Category: Podcast

  • Why Boycott? Maya Wind on the Case Against Israeli Universities

    Why Boycott? Maya Wind on the Case Against Israeli Universities

    Over the past few years, calls for the boycott of Israeli universities have grown louder. This discourse generally entwines two different sets of arguments. The first is an argument about the effectiveness or validity of academic boycotts.  The second, because it’s Israel, is about whether Israeli universities are being unfairly targeted due to anti-Semitism. Curiously, what Israeli universities themselves might have specifically done to deserve is often relegated to an afterthought.

    My guest today is Maya Wind. She is an Israeli citizen, and a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California Riverside. She is also the author of Towers of Ivory and Steel, How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom, published last year by Verso press. Her book is a direct answer to that last question.  The charge sheet that she brings against Israeli universities is a long one. And it should give people pause before thinking that Israeli universities are unproblematic.

    Some of you are not going to like this interview. I suspect some will not enjoy the platform given to these opinions. But given the tenor of the times, I very much think it is worth a listen. I think there are two points in particular that are worth thinking about. The first is whether the boycott is about the universities themselves, or about Israel in general. The second is the standard for boycott. Wind makes it clear that she doesn’t see an absolute standard here other than that some oppressed group requests. So, for her, the relative level of complicity of Israeli universities in the dispossession of Palestinians and, say, that of Chinese universities in the repression of Uyghurs is irrelevant because the key factor is that one group asked for the boycott and the other didn’t. It’s about consistent allyship rather than relative guilt.  That wasn’t something I had understood beforehand, and I’m guessing it might be new for many of you as well. But maybe it’s best if I let my guest explain things on her own. Over to Maya.

    The World of Higher Education Podcast
    Episode 3.22 | Why Boycott? Maya Wind on the Case Against Israeli Universities 

    Transcript

    Alex Usher (AU): Maya, your book lays out the case for sanctions against Israeli universities and for boycotting them. But before we get to that, I want to ask about something you don’t really cover in the book: What’s the evidence that boycotts or academic sanctions are an effective strategy for forcing political change?

    Maya Wind (MW): That’s a really crucial question. First, for listeners who may not be as familiar with the context, the movement for boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) was first called for by Palestinian civil society organizations in 2005—so, 20 years ago now. The BDS movement, including the call for an academic boycott of Israeli universities, was heavily inspired by the movement against apartheid in South Africa. In that case, the isolation of many apartheid institutions, including universities, played a key role in bringing an end to the apartheid system.

    Of course, as academics and students, we are all students of history. If we take seriously the idea that Israel is a settler state and that Israelis are colonizers, then history tells us that colonizers have never initiated the process of decolonization on their own. In every case of settler colonialism, external pressure has been necessary to compel colonizers to participate in that process. The BDS movement is specifically seeking to create that external pressure by building a grassroots international movement to hold the Israeli state—and its universities—accountable.

    PACBI, the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, actually predates the broader BDS call by a year. It was formed in 2004 and, even then—21 years ago now—identified Israeli universities as pillars of the system of racial rule and apartheid. As academics, particularly those in the West, we have an obligation to respond to this call by severing our ties to Israeli universities. Otherwise, we remain directly complicit.

    AU: Your charge sheet, if I can put it that way, against Israeli institutions is really threefold. The first major charge—using your words from the epilogue—is that they need to stop denying that their campuses stand on expropriated Palestinian lands and cease to serve as engines of Judaization, colonization, and Palestinian dispossession. What exactly do Israeli institutions do in this regard, and why does it matter so much?

    MW: Right. Here, I’m following not only Palestinian civil society and Palestinian scholars but also Indigenous scholars around the world—particularly in settler states—who have long examined the role of the settler university. These scholars have highlighted how universities have often functioned as pillars of ongoing Indigenous dispossession, built on stolen lands that were cleared through genocide. This is part of a broader, global movement, and there is extensive critical scholarship on this issue in other settler states as well.

    In the context of the Israeli settler state, “Judaization” is actually the official terminology used by the Israeli government. It refers to a process seen in many settler states: the twin projects of continual removal and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, the transfer of Palestinian land ownership to Jewish Israelis, and the ongoing expansion of Israeli frontiers—redistributing the Jewish population across what was historic Palestine.

    If we trace the history of Israeli universities, this pattern becomes clear. It starts with Hebrew University, the first university of the Zionist movement, and continues with all the universities established by the Israeli state since then. For example, the University of Haifa is in the Galilee, the region with the highest Palestinian population. Ben-Gurion University is in the Negev, an arid southern region where Jewish Israelis were historically less likely to settle. The most recent university to be accredited, Ariel University, is located in the illegal settlement of Ariel, deep in the occupied West Bank.

    For over a century, Israeli universities have been physically designed, built, and strategically located to support the state’s project of Palestinian dispossession, particularly in regions of strategic concern to the Israeli government. Any reckoning with Israeli universities—or settler universities more broadly—must begin with the question of land itself. This is one of the central issues I explore in the book.

    AU: Before I go into the other elements of the charge sheet, you’ve used the term “settler” and “settler colonialism” a couple of times. What distinction, if any, do you draw between the need to boycott Israeli universities, as you argue, and the historical case that could be made for boycotting institutions in Canada or the United States? Why sanction one and not the other?

    MW: That’s a really important question. The first and primary answer is that the Indigenous population most directly impacted by the violence of these settler universities—in this case, Palestinians—have explicitly called for a boycott. A boycott is not a value; it is a tactic. Indigenous movements around the world have used different tactics to advance decolonization, and these tactics change over time and depend on the specific context.

    In this case, more than 20 years ago, the overwhelming majority of Palestinian civil society came together to advance their liberation struggle and issued a call for boycott. They outlined a theory of change, arguing that Western governments—particularly those heavily invested in the Israeli settler state—not only provide arms but also offer diplomatic and legal immunity that allows Israel to continue committing war crimes, including, most recently, the crime of genocide. Given this, they have made it clear that those of us in the international community have an obligation to rise up and pressure our own governments to sever ties and isolate the Israeli regime until the process of decolonization begins and the system of apartheid is dismantled.

    This is a grassroots movement, and we do not need to wait for our governments to act.

    AU: That’s a useful clarification. The second area where you’re most critical is the cooperation between universities on one hand and the military, Shin Bet, and other security services on the other. You write about how the connection between university research and the military in Israel is somewhat different from how it operates in the United States or other countries, partly because research institutes in Israel cooperate so directly with the security sector. What does this military cooperation look like in practice? And is it just about research, or is there also an academic programming element?

    MW: Right. This is a very important question because the collaboration between Israeli universities, the security state, and the military industry is incredibly deep and comprehensive. We see this in several ways.

    First, Israeli universities function as military bases by designing and operating specialized, degree-granting programs tailored for security state personnel, including the Israeli Security Agency (Shin Bet), Israeli police forces, and soldiers. These are the same forces that have engaged in decades of daily violations of Palestinian rights and international law. This is well documented, and these academic programs actively train soldiers and security personnel to refine their operations.

    One example is Hebrew University, where the Department of Islamic and Middle East Studies trains soldiers in the Intelligence Corps, providing them with linguistic and regional expertise to improve their surveillance of the Palestinian population. This training directly contributes to the creation of target banks for airstrikes in Gaza, as we have seen over the past 16 months. That is just one of many examples.

    Another form of cooperation is research and institutional collaborations. The Institute for Criminology at Hebrew University and the Dayan Center at Tel Aviv University work closely with military and security state experts to produce scholarship that advances security operations. Their research informs policy recommendations for the Israeli security establishment.

    A third example is the close ties between universities and military industries. It is not widely known that major arms manufacturers like Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, Israel Aerospace Industries, and Elbit Systems—the largest suppliers to the Israeli military and major global exporters of weapons—were actually founded on Israeli university campuses. These companies develop and refine their technologies by testing them in occupied Palestinian territories, violating international and human rights law daily. They then market these products globally as “battle-proven.” To this day, Israeli universities serve as critical laboratories for these industries.

    In all of these ways, it is impossible to understand the Israeli security state and military-industrial complex without examining the role of the Israeli university system.

    AU: The third charge you discuss is that Israeli universities are not academically neutral—that they do not provide all staff and students with equal opportunities to be protected from outside influence or to thrive academically. We often hear that Israeli universities do not discriminate, but you have a different perspective.

    MW: Yes. One of the things that really struck me while researching and writing this book was the extensive scholarly work that already exists on this issue. I conducted an ethnography of Israeli universities, spending significant time across Israel’s eight major public universities. I spoke with and accompanied Palestinian student organizers, and I interviewed both Palestinian and Jewish Israeli faculty and staff.

    What stood out to me—both in my fieldwork and in my background research—was just how much has already been written about this. There is a rich body of scholarship, not only in Hebrew and Arabic but also in English, often published in leading peer-reviewed journals in Europe and North America. Palestinian scholars, both in Palestinian and Israeli universities, have extensively documented the constraints on knowledge production, the marginalization of Palestinian critical epistemology, and the challenges of producing anti-colonial scholarship within the confines of the Zionist university system. They have also written in detail about the systematic discrimination Palestinian students face and their experiences within these institutions.

    Yet, despite this extensive scholarship, I find that it is largely unread in Western academic communities. This raises important questions about why we, in the West, have failed to engage with this work and why we have instead accepted the narratives presented by Jewish Israeli university administrators and scholars, who often portray Israeli universities as beacons of democracy. In reality, this has never been the case, and Palestinians have been documenting and writing about these inequalities for a very long time. I cite much of this work in my book, and I also corroborated it through my own interviews.

    What I found was not only that Israeli universities are embedded within and implicated in a broader system of apartheid, but also that Palestinian student organizing and political activism on campuses are violently suppressed. This suppression has intensified over the past 16 months, as Palestinian scholars and students speak out against the genocide and mobilize for Palestinian liberation on Israeli campuses.

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    AU: Maya, you’ve discussed issues at several institutions across Israel. You’ve specifically singled out Ariel University for its role in normalizing the occupation and Hebrew University for its failure to protect academic freedom. Are there any institutions that stand out to you as having a better record than others? Is there one that you might say should not be subject to a boycott?

    MW: The call for an academic boycott was laid out by Palestinian civil society and Palestinian scholars. Just last year, in 2023, this call was reiterated by not only the Union of Palestinian Faculty and Employees but also by every single Palestinian student union at every Palestinian university. They reaffirmed their call for us to enact the academic boycott.

    This is a call coming from Palestinian civil society, and as it is worded, it applies to all complicit Israeli universities. In the course of my research, I found that every single Israeli university is deeply implicated in the structures of occupation and apartheid. Not one is exempt.

    At this time, the call remains for a boycott of all Israeli universities, and I hope my book helps to substantiate why that is necessary.

    AU: It sounds to me like the Palestinian call is really about Israel as a whole, rather than specifically about Israeli universities, right? And I have to say, when I read the chapter on the relationship between universities and the military, I thought to myself: I can’t imagine a university in any country—let alone one as highly militarized as Israel—saying no to providing academic training for military officers.

    Universities are instrumental to the state, right? So when we talk about disapproving of university policies, aren’t we really talking about disapproving of Israeli state priorities? Is there any way an individual Israeli institution could change this if it wanted to?

    MW: I think that’s a really critical question. We have to understand—and take seriously—that settler states, systems of violence, and even genocide do not reproduce themselves automatically. These are systems of violence that are upheld by a vast network of institutions, including many in civil society. It is not just the military, not just the security state, and not just military industries. A whole host of public institutions—what we often think of as civil society institutions—lend themselves to this violence of elimination. This case is no different.

    But what we also have to recognize is that it is not just the institutions—it is the people within them who sustain and reproduce these structures. There is the active labor of thousands of Israelis, across hundreds of institutions, including universities, who are making this violence possible.

    What I want to emphasize here is that Israeli academics have tried very hard to have it both ways. The call for an academic boycott has been underway for more than two decades, and one of the main arguments used by Israeli university administrators and academics who oppose it is that they cannot possibly be held accountable for the crimes of the Israeli state—if such crimes even exist, as is still debated within Israeli universities. They claim that it is unjust to hold them responsible for what the state is doing.

    But at the same time, when they are confronted—particularly over the last year—by thousands of students, faculty, and staff participating in the boycott, pointing out that they are directly complicit in apartheid and now genocide, these same university administrators and Israeli academics respond in exactly the opposite way. They say precisely what you just said: Of course, we are embedded in the state. Many of our students are soldiers. Why wouldn’t we cooperate with the state we are a part of?

    They often go even further, offering justifications for genocide and apartheid. So they cannot have it both ways. Either they defend themselves by claiming they are not at all accountable and cannot be implicated in what the state is doing, or they admit that they are, in fact, part of the state—at which point they must also take responsibility for their role in sustaining its system of oppression.

    AU: One argument that emerged in Canada over the last few months—particularly around the end of the encampment at the University of Windsor, if I’m not mistaken—was that the university agreed to boycott Israeli universities as part of a resolution. In response, some argued—I can’t remember if it was Michael Geist or Anthony Housefather in the House of Commons—that if you boycott Israeli institutions but not universities in other countries guilty of similar actions, then that is antisemitic.

    For instance, many of the same criticisms you make about Israeli universities—such as failing to uphold free debate and cooperating with the military—could likely be made about Chinese universities in relation to the government’s policies in Xinjiang or Tibet. What do you make of that argument? Should we also be boycotting Chinese universities? And if not, why not?

    MW: Boycotts—whether organized by unions or any other group—are always made in response to a call. It is not up to us to unilaterally decide to boycott a university system. That decision belongs to the communities directly impacted by the violence of that university system. When such a call is made, it is then up to the international community to assess whether the institutions in question are, in fact, complicit—and to decide whether to participate in the boycott.

    To my knowledge, there has been no such call from other Indigenous communities in similar contexts. There could be, and if there were, I think many of us would absolutely consider participating. But this argument is ultimately a distraction—one that is often pushed by Israel and its Zionist supporters to divert attention from the central issue at hand. The reality is that Palestinians have called for a boycott. Now, it is up to us to assess whether that call is justified and whether we will comply

    AU: You wrote this book prior to October 7, 2023. What has changed since then, both in terms of how Israeli universities behave and in terms of the boycott movement?

    MW: Over the past 16 months, we have seen a devastating acceleration of a project that has spanned over a hundred years. Genocide is structural to the Israeli state, just as it is to settler states elsewhere. For two decades, Palestinian civil society has been telling us that various institutions in Israeli society have long served as part of the infrastructure laying the groundwork for the genocide we have witnessed unfold over the last 16 months—part of the Israeli state’s long-term project to ethnically cleanse Palestine of the Palestinian people.

    My book, which I submitted to the press shortly before this latest acceleration of the genocide began, details many of the ways in which universities are implicated. But it should come as no surprise that this is a structural problem. Israeli universities have continuously worked in service of the state, uninterrupted and ongoing, from before the state’s founding to the present moment—including this phase of the genocide.

    Over the last 16 months, Israeli universities have continued to develop weapons and technologies used against Palestinians in Gaza and the occupied West Bank. They have continued training soldiers and producing Hasbara—Israeli state propaganda—to shield Israel from international criticism. In fact, Israeli universities have actively intervened to prevent academic boycotts from being implemented on Western campuses, smearing student, faculty, and staff organizers, and in some cases, calling for them to be forcibly dispersed. They have also played a direct role in producing legal scholarship to aid the Israeli state in resisting the genocide case brought by South Africa at the International Court of Justice.

    Beyond this, universities have provided tangible benefits to soldiers, offering course credit, scholarships, and special privileges for those returning from Gaza. In countless ways, Israeli universities remain embedded in the infrastructure of violence that sustains the Israeli state, even as that state now stands on trial in the highest courts in the world for genocide.

    If you’re asking what has changed, I think the biggest shift is that more people have now come to recognize what Palestinians have been calling for over the past 20 years: the urgency of intervention. There is an increasing recognition that international civil society must take action and stand with the Palestinian people in their struggle for liberation—and participate in the broader project of decolonization. That is a significant development in the global movement for Palestinian liberation, and we will continue to build on it.

    There is no going back.

    AU: Maya, thanks so much for joining us today.

    MW: Thank you.

    AU: And that just leaves me to thank our excellent producers, Tiffany MacLennan and Sam Pufek, as well as you—our viewers, listeners, and readers—for tuning in. If you have any questions, comments, or concerns, please don’t hesitate to contact us at [email protected]. Folks, please subscribe to our YouTube channel so you never miss an episode of The World of Higher Education.

    Join us again next week when I’ll be joined by Hilligje van’t Land. She’s the Secretary General of the International Association of Universities, located in Paris, and she’ll be talking about the joys of running the world’s oldest transnational university organization. Bye for now.

    *This podcast transcript was generated using an AI transcription service with limited editing. Please forgive any errors made through this service. Please note, the views and opinions expressed in each episode are those of the individual contributors, and do not necessarily reflect those of the podcast host and team, or our sponsors.

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  • Students on the Frontlines: The Ongoing Protests in Serbia with Jim Dickinson

    Students on the Frontlines: The Ongoing Protests in Serbia with Jim Dickinson

    If I say the word “Serbia”, chances are your mind goes to things like the NATO air attacks of 1999 and the associated Kosovo War, to the breakup of Yugoslavia and to Marshal Tito and maybe – if you’re more historically-minded – to the origins of World War I.  It probably doesn’t go to higher education or radical student politics.

    But that’s kind of unfortunate because in fact Serbia’s recent history has had plenty of instances where youth- or student-based movements have had an effect on politics, most notably with respect to the overthrow of Slobodan Milosevic in 2000.  And that’s very relevant today, because for the last 18 weeks, Serbia students have been on a campaign to rid the country of the governing Serbian Progressive Party on grounds of corruption.  They have formed some extraordinary alliances across civil society leading to regular marches involving tens of thousands of people as well as a series of rotating strikes.  The movement has not yet reached its ultimate objective, but it has claimed some notable victories along the way, most notably when the Prime Minister, Milos Vucevic, was forced to resign in January. 

    With me today to analyze all of this is Jim Dickinson.  He’s an associate editor at Wonkhe in London, one of the most remarkable Higher education sites in existence, and to my mind absolutely the best-informed person on the European student politics scene.  Jim wrote an excellent summary of the situation in Serbia around the time of the Vucevic resignation, and we thought it was high time to finally bring Jim on the show. 

    Jim talks about the origins of the protests, its growth and metastasis into a genuinely popular national protest movement and its prospects for future success.  Will Serbia end up being like Bangladesh, with students actually forcing regie change?  The future is never certain, of course.  But what I liked about Jim’s perspective is the way he takes account of the interplay between official student “unions” and an unofficial student “movement” and explains why you need to take account of both to understand the current situation in Serbia.

    But enough from me.  Let’s turn it over to Jim.

    The World of Higher Education Podcast
    Episode 3.21 | Students on the Frontlines: The Ongoing Protests in Serbia with Jim Dickinson 

    Transcript

    Alex Usher: Jim, before we get to current day events, tell me—what are student politics normally like in Serbia? Are student unions more about service delivery or activism? Is there just one national student union, or are there multiple ones? Are they organized on a party-political basis? Tell me how it all works in a normal year.

    Jim Dickinson: You know, we were there about 14 or 15 months ago, and we were quite impressed. We took a group of UK student unions on a little bus tour, as I do each year to different parts of Europe, and it was quite impressive. Student representation is guaranteed at both the faculty and university levels. Broadly speaking, what is also guaranteed is a student union, which has responsibility for extracurricular activities, as well as for student voice and representing students.

    These unions then feed into something called the Student Conference of the Universities of Serbia. What’s interesting—and a few countries in Europe have done this—is that they’ve put the national student union on a statutory footing. So, it’s actually mentioned in legislation. Essentially, they took the National Conference of Rectors, the university association, added an “S” at the front, and set it up as a statutory body that listens to students’ views on higher education.

    So, in theory, the legislation establishes representation at the faculty, university, and countrywide levels. Students have the opportunity to elect other students, organize student activities, and be the voice of students—which are broadly the two activities you would expect when you hear the phrase “student union.” Maybe not in the U.S., but certainly in most other parts of the world.

    Alex Usher: Is there party political involvement in student unions there?

    Jim Dickinson: I mean, this is really interesting. Some people would say there is. But one of the things that’s kind of, I guess, moderately characteristic of the former Yugoslavian and Eastern European countries is that there’s not much open talk of politics.

    Sometimes students will align with particular political views, but this isn’t like what we might see in Austria, Germany, or even Finland, where large factional or party political groups of students stand for election to student councils. In Serbia, student unions are framed as being independent from formal politics—pure, in a sense, and separate from direct political involvement.

    Now, of course, what actually happens—depending on who you listen to and believe—is that youth branches of political parties do stand in these elections. And depending on the perspective, the government—certainly the current government—is accused of pumping in money and candidates to ensure a level of control in these bodies, much like what might happen in other parts of civil society in the country.

    But officially, you don’t see that. In fact, in some of these countries, student unions will even sign documents declaring their complete independence from party politics as a way of signaling, “We’re not about that; we’re about the students.”

    Alex Usher: Tell me about the history of student unions getting involved in national politics. I know there’s a history going back to the 1960s in Bulgaria of student involvement in politics.

    After the fall of the Berlin Wall, there were two major instances in Serbia. In 1996–97, students led protests against what were seen as rigged elections in favor of Slobodan Milosevic. Then in 2000, there was a youth-led—but not student union-led—movement called Otpor, which was the central organizing group that ultimately helped remove Milosevic after the 2000 elections.

    Now, obviously, there’s a big mobilization happening today. What’s the connection between those events in the late 90s and early 2000s and what we’re seeing now?

    Jim Dickinson: So, ahead of putting student unions—both locally and nationally—on a statutory footing, there were always student groups and associations, often based around faculties or entire universities. Because these groups were relatively loose and voluntary, their level of political interest and influence would fluctuate.

    They often got caught up in the kind of events you described—first in the late 80s and then throughout the 90s. And that’s actually quite common. When student groups are loosely organized and not statutory, with many different associations and organizations floating around, they tend to get swept up in big political movements when those arise.

    Now, while you’re right that Otpor was technically a youth movement, in practice, it was largely dominated by students. That group of people was widely credited with the overthrow of Milosevic. We’ve actually visited some of the student accommodations where they were organizing, and you can really see how that must have worked—how students would have been talking to each other, coordinating, and mobilizing.

    Beyond that point, things get a bit more complicated.

    Alex Usher: So, Otpor was student-led, but not student union-led. That’s the distinction here?

    Jim Dickinson: Yeah.

    Alex Usher: Let’s get to current events. It’s November 1st, 2024. We’re at the railway station in Novi Sad, which is Serbia’s second-largest city. What happens next?

    Jim Dickinson: So, a canopy collapses, killing 15 people. By the time they’d completed their assessment about 24 hours later, the death toll had risen to 15. Pretty quickly, rumors started going around that this must be linked to corruption.

    There’s been a series of complex, controversial deals linked to some Chinese companies involving infrastructure projects across different parts of the country. So the view was that this was negligence, this was corruption, and that this was another example—right on their doorstep in this big student city—of the Serbian government’s corruption causing harm and death.

    Social media videos of the canopy collapsing on young people were pretty heartbreaking, and they went viral very quickly.

    What was interesting at that point was that this student group based in the Faculty of Philosophy, which had already been upset about the formal student union elections in their faculty and at the University of Novi Sad, then switched their attention from occupying the faculty building over student union election politics.

    They turned their focus to this incident, and quite quickly organized a blockade of the railway station, a blockade of the faculty, and then things kind of swept on from there.

    Alex Usher: I get that—it’s understandable why the collapse of a public building might make people upset about corruption. But why is it youth leading this charge? I mean, it’s not unnatural, but it’s also not a given that students would be the ones leading this.

    Why them and not some other group in society? Or even opposition parties? Why a small group of disaffected philosophy students?

    Jim Dickinson: Well, I mean, in many ways, that is the big question. I’m sure if the Serbian Progressive Party knew the answer, Alex, they’d have stopped it by now.

    I think the reality is that all of those involved in formal mechanisms of politics—to some extent—are discredited. And that’s something you see across many political systems, right? There’s a general distrust of politicians and of formal politics, both on the right and the left, in North America and across Europe.

    What’s interesting about this group of students is that, in many ways, you’ll find a similar type of group at almost every relatively elite, fairly academic, large university in the world. You’ve got the students who get elected to official positions, wear suits, and sit down with the rector, vice-chancellor, or president. And then there’s this other, rougher-looking group—the ones who like to think about bigger political issues. They’re the ones who will blockade a building, go on a protest, or join a demonstration.

    This particular group has probably always been there, usually complaining about student union elections. Then, suddenly, this huge tragedy happens in the city, and they find their big issue—something they can build their movement around.

    Often, they talk about building a social movement, but it’s hard to do when the issues they focus on don’t gain traction. This, however, was not a hard issue to mobilize around. It was a tragedy, it was clear-cut, and off the back of that, they took action.

    Alex Usher: That’s early November. The protests build and build, and by early December, they’ve secured the resignation of the minister of construction.

    So, at this point, what were the student movement’s aims? I get that they were upset about corruption, but what were they actually demanding in these demonstrations? And, given how informal the structure was, who was deciding what those demands were?

    Jim Dickinson: It’s really interesting because the demands haven’t really changed since then. Some were directly related to the tragedy, some were broader, and some were focused on higher education.

    Actually, if you look at some of the pro-Palestinian blockades and demonstrations in different countries over the past couple of years, they’ve also had a mix of demands like this.

    In this case, there were demands to publish all the documents related to the reconstruction of the station. There were calls to ensure that no criminal proceedings would be brought against protest participants. There was also a demand for the dismissal of all public officials who had assaulted students and professors—of which there were quite a few.

    Then there were demands related to higher education, like increasing the budget for higher education by 20%. And what’s fascinating is that this list of demands hasn’t really changed.

    Now, to answer your question about leadership—one of the defining characteristics of this kind of activism, which some people see as very old-fashioned, is that it’s highly decentralized. Decisions are made collectively, with lots of people sitting in circles discussing them. There’s no single figurehead. They’ve really tried to stick to those principles, even though, historically, that kind of approach sometimes falls apart depending on which allegorical novel you read.

    Despite the media’s efforts to identify particular ringleaders or intellectual figures behind the movement, it’s been difficult to pin down a single “bad guy” or figurehead. This stands in stark contrast to the formal student movement, which operates like a traditional hierarchy—a structured system where representatives elect other representatives, and so on.

    Alex Usher: So, it’s a little like the Occupy movement?

    Jim Dickinson: Yeah, very, very similar.

    Alex Usher: Over the course of December and January, the movement builds to the point where, eventually, the prime minister resigns on January 28th. That wasn’t even one of the demands, but it happened anyway. To make that happen, they had to build a coalition—not just within the student movement, which is one thing, but also by making links across civil society, with other groups like legal organizations, unions, teachers’ unions, and so on. How did a group of students manage that, especially given how decentralized their power structure was?

    Jim Dickinson: Part of it was about peaceful protest. If you look at historical examples like the Prague protests or the Velvet Revolution, they were always very deliberately peaceful, even though allegations are often thrown at them.

    So, good framing was key—absolutely sticking to those principles. And then, night after night, day after day, at each protest, they slowly built support from wider society. As time went on, they captured the imagination of more and more people. First, musicians got involved, then lawyers, then farmers, then taxi drivers.

    Each time a new group joined or more people expressed sympathy, the movement grew. And there’s historical precedent for this—going back to the late 80s and early 90s—where what started as a student movement began to voice deeper concerns about corruption, about the direction of the government, about how citizens are treated, and about the growing disconnect between the public and politicians. And they used powerful, simple, visually striking imagery. You might have seen the red hands in some of the protest photos—symbolizing “blood on their hands.” That really resonated with people.

    Because these countries have been through this kind of thing before—where students lead the charge and wider society gets behind them—there was this sense that both the students and the broader public felt the weight of history on their shoulders. And from there, it just kept growing.

    I was watching over Christmas—one night, there were 10,000 people in the streets, then 12,000 the next night, then 15,000. It just kept building. And every time the government tried to use traditional authoritarian tactics, the protesters held their nerve. They maintained their dignity, and in doing so, they were able to expose the government as authoritarian—cracking down on people who were making perfectly reasonable demands.

    Alex Usher: So that’s what’s happening in the streets. But what about the campuses? Are they shut down? Is there a strike? Is there a risk of losing the school year? And how are university administrations dealing with all of this?

    Jim Dickinson: That’s a really interesting question.

    Quite often—and this is probably true in the UK, certainly true in Canada and the U.S.—when there’s a blockade of a building, an occupation, or a major protest, you still get a form of teaching happening. There are efforts to ensure that education continues, though it might not be the same curriculum the university originally intended, and it often takes on a particular political edge.

    So, what they’ve been doing is blockading faculty buildings and university buildings, stopping some administrative functions from happening. But some teaching is still taking place.

    Now, whether that translates into exams happening or students receiving certificates at the end of the year varies widely. It depends on the campus, the faculty, and the university.

    A lot of that comes down to the level of support for the movement. So, it depends on what you mean by a “write-off.” There’s plenty of evidence that students are still getting an education, but if you’re the kind of student who isn’t interested in any of this and just wants your diploma at the end of the year, then it’s probably a disaster.

    Alex Usher: Just so listeners and viewers know, we’re recording this on February 11th—nine days before the air date. This is the 101st day of the protests. What do you think the endgame is here? What would it take at this point for students to achieve the aims you talked about earlier? Or are they going to have to settle for half a loaf?

    Jim Dickinson: Well, I mean, it’s really interesting.

    Just this week—or maybe it was right at the end of last week, I’ve lost track—they got the 20% budget increase, for example. Nobody expected that to happen two weeks ago. So, slowly, they’re managing to achieve pretty much everything except the dismissal of all the public officials they’ve been demanding.

    The problem, of course, is that even if they achieve all of those demands, they still won’t have reached their broader political goal—which is that they believe this is a deeply corrupt government. And while they don’t frame it in party political terms, they think this populist government needs to go. So, the endgame starts to get tricky for them.

    They’ve already achieved far more than most people expected. And historically, there’s precedent for this. There were plenty of student uprisings in Eastern Europe in the 1960s that captured the public’s imagination but ultimately didn’t lead to political change.

    So, once most of the demands are met and we get closer to the end of the academic year, will the movement start to fizzle out? Who knows?

    But for many of the people involved, they’re probably already thinking, “We’ve accomplished a hell of a lot more than we ever thought we would.” And certainly a lot more than the official student movement was ever going to achieve on these issues.

    Alex Usher: That brings me to my last question. This has been a success for the student movement—if you can call it that—but not necessarily a success for student unions. So, what do you think the impact will be on more official student organizations going forward? Are unions likely to be supplanted by something a little more anarchist? Or do they just go back to providing the same services they always have?

    Jim Dickinson: I mean, look—across the world, the bigger, more sophisticated, and more formally recognized student unions are, and the more access they have to decision-makers, the more mistrust tends to build.

    Both the textbooks and reality tell us that when student leaders start spending too much time with people who aren’t students, people begin to see them as too close to decision-makers. And that dynamic exists in every student movement around the world.

    The real question for a system like Serbia’s—which has student unions written into the constitution and structured to mirror the conference of rectors, university presidents, and vice-chancellors—is whether, in hindsight, that structure is simply too close to power.

    And that comes down to one of two concerns.

    If the official student movement hasn’t actually been controlled by the government but just appears too close to it, then there’s some broader reflection needed on the system’s credibility. But if it has been deliberately set up as a way for a corrupt national government to control it—to act as a puppet master—then that carries much bigger implications.

    Either way, you have to assume that where student energy is focused will shift. And that’s key because there’s only so much student energy available.

    Right now, the biggest problem for formal student unions is that student energy hasn’t gone into electing people to run the social committee or to be the faculty vice president and have a chat with the dean about curriculum.

    This year, the bulk of student energy has gone into something bigger—and they’ve won. That’s something a lot of people, both within the sector and seemingly within the country as a whole, will have to reckon with.

    Alex Usher: Jim, it’s been a pleasure. Thanks so much for joining us today. And I just want to take a moment to thank our excellent producers, Sam Pufek and Tiffany MacLennan, as well as you—our viewers, listeners, and readers—for joining us. If you have any questions about today’s episode, don’t hesitate to reach out at [email protected]. Never miss an episode of The World of Higher Education podcast—subscribe to our YouTube channel today. Next week, we’re off, but join us two weeks from today when our guest will be Israeli scholar Maya Wind. She’s a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Riverside, and the author of Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom. Bye for now.

    *This podcast transcript was generated using an AI transcription service with limited editing. Please forgive any errors made through this service.

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  • Data, Decisions, and Disruptions: Inside the World of University Rankings

    Data, Decisions, and Disruptions: Inside the World of University Rankings

    University rankings are pretty much everywhere. Though the earliest university rankings in the U. S. date back to the early 1900s and the modern ones from the 1983 debut of the U. S. News and World Report rankings. The kind of rankings we tend to talk about now, international or global rankings, really only date back to 2003 with the creation of the Shanghai Academic Rankings of World Universities.

    Over the decade that followed that first publication, a triumvirate emerged at the top of the rankings pyramid. The Shanghai Rankings, run by a group of academics at the Shanghai Jiao Tong University, the Quacquarelli Symonds, or QS Rankings, and the Times Higher Education’s World University Rankings. Between them, these three rankings producers, particularly QS and Times Higher, created a bewildering array of new rankings, dividing the world up by geography and field of study, mainly based on metrics relating to research.

    Joining me today is the former Chief Data Officer of the Times Higher Education Rankings, Duncan Ross. He took over those rankings at a time when it seemed like the higher education world might be running out of things to rank. Under his tutelage, though, the Times Impact Rankings, which are based around the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals, were developed. And that’s created a genuinely new hierarchy in world higher education, at least among those institutions who choose to submit to the rankings.  

    My discussion with Duncan today covers a wide range of topics related to his time at THE. But the most enjoyable bit by far, for me anything, was the bit about the genesis of the impact rankings. Listen a bit, especially when Duncan talks about how the Impact Rankings came about because the THE realized that its industry rankings weren’t very reliable. Fun fact, around that time I got into a very public debate with Phil Beatty, the editor of the Times Higher, on exactly that subject. Which means maybe, just maybe, I’m kind of a godparent to the impact rankings. But that’s just me. You may well find other points of interest in this very compelling interview. Let’s hand things over to Duncan.

    The World of Higher Education Podcast
    Episode 3.20 | Data, Decisions, and Disruptions: Inside the World of University Rankings 

    Transcript

    Alex Usher: So, Duncan, let’s start at the beginning. I’m curious—what got you into university rankings in the first place? How did you end up at Times Higher Education in 2015?

    Duncan Ross: I think it was almost by chance. I had been working in the tech sector for a large data warehousing company, which meant I was working across many industries—almost every industry except higher education. I was looking for a new challenge, something completely different. Then a friend approached me and mentioned a role that might interest me. So I started talking to Times Higher Education, and it turned out it really was a great fit.

    Alex Usher: So when you arrived at Times Higher in 2015, the company already had a pretty full set of rankings products, right? They had the global rankings, the regional rankings, which I think started around 2010, and then the subject or field of study rankings came a couple of years later. When you looked at all of that, what did you think? What did you feel needed to be improved?

    Duncan Ross: Well, the first thing I had to do was actually bring all of that production in-house. At the time, even though Times Higher had rankings, they were produced by Clarivate—well, Thomson Reuters, as it was then. They were doing a perfectly good job, but if you’re not in control of the data yourself, there’s a limit to what you can do with it.

    Another key issue was that, while it looked like Times Higher had many rankings, in reality, they had just one: the World University Rankings. The other rankings were simply different cuts of that same data. And even within the World University Rankings, only 400 universities were included, with a strong bias toward Europe and North America. About 26 or 27 percent of those institutions were from the U.S., which didn’t truly reflect the global landscape of higher education.

    So the challenge was: how could we broaden our scope and truly capture the world of higher education beyond the usual suspects? And beyond that, were there other aspects of universities that we could measure, rather than just relying on research-centered metrics? There are good reasons why international rankings tend to focus on research—it’s the most consistent data available—but as you know, it’s certainly not the only way to define excellence in higher education.

    Alex Usher: Oh, yeah. So how did you address the issue of geographic diversity? Was it as simple as saying, “We’re not going to limit it to 400 universities—we’re going to expand it”? I think the ranking now includes over a thousand institutions, right? I’ve forgotten the exact number.

    Duncan Ross: It’s actually around 2,100 or so, and in practice, the number is even larger because, about two years ago, we introduced the concept of reporter institutions. These are institutions that haven’t yet met the criteria to be fully ranked but are already providing data.

    The World University Rankings have an artificial limit because there’s a threshold for participation based on the number of research articles published. That threshold is set at 1,000 papers over a five-year period. If we look at how many universities could potentially meet that criterion, it’s probably around 3,000, and that number keeps growing. But even that is just a fraction of the higher education institutions worldwide. There are likely 30,000—maybe even 40,000—higher education institutions globally, and that’s before we even consider community colleges.

    So, expanding the rankings was about removing artificial boundaries. We needed to reach out to institutions in parts of the world that weren’t well represented and think about higher education in a way that wasn’t so Anglo-centric.

    One of the biggest challenges I’ve encountered—and it’s something people inevitably fall into—is that we tend to view higher education through the lens of our own experiences. But higher education doesn’t function the same way everywhere. It’s easy to assume that all universities should look like those in Canada, the U.S., or the UK—but that’s simply not the case.

    To improve the rankings, we had to be open-minded, engage with institutions globally, and carefully navigate the challenges of collecting data on such a large scale. As a result, Times Higher Education now has data on around 5,000 to 6,000 universities—a huge step up from the original 400. Still, it’s just a fraction of the institutions that exist worldwide.

    Alex Usher: Well, that’s exactly the mission of this podcast—to get people to think beyond an Anglo-centric view of the world. So I take your point that, in your first couple of years at Times Higher Education, most of what you were doing was working with a single set of data and slicing it in different ways.

    But even with that, collecting data for rankings isn’t simple, right? It’s tricky, you have to make a lot of decisions, especially about inclusion—what to include and how to weight different factors. And I think you’ve had to deal with a couple of major issues over the years—one in your first few years and another more recently.

    One was about fractional counting of articles, which I remember went on for quite a while. There was that big surge of CERN-related articles, mostly coming out of Switzerland but with thousands of authors from around the world, which affected the weighting. That led to a move toward fractional weighting, which in theory equalized things a bit—but not everyone agreed.

    More recently, you’ve had an issue with voting, right? What I think was called a cartel of voters in the Middle East, related to the reputation rankings. Can you talk a bit about how you handle these kinds of challenges?

    Duncan Ross: Well, I think the starting point is that we’re always trying to evaluate things in a fair and consistent way. But inevitably, we’re dealing with a very noisy and messy world.

    The two cases you mentioned are actually quite different. One is about adjusting to the norms of the higher education sector, particularly in publishing. A lot of academics, especially those working within a single discipline, assume that publishing works the same way across all fields—that you can create a universal set of rules that apply to everyone. But that’s simply not the case.

    For example, the concept of a first author doesn’t exist in every discipline. Likewise, in some fields, the principal investigator (PI) is always listed at the end of the author list, while in others, that’s not the norm.

    One of the biggest challenges we faced was in fields dealing with big science—large-scale research projects involving hundreds or even thousands of contributors. In high-energy physics, for example, a decision was made back in the 1920s: everyone who participates in an experiment above a certain threshold is listed as an author in alphabetical order. They even have a committee to determine who meets that threshold—because, of course, it’s academia, so there has to be a committee.

    But when you have 5,000 authors on a single paper, that distorts the rankings. So we had to develop a mechanism to handle that. Ideally, we’d have a single metric that works in all cases—just like in physics, where we don’t use one model of gravity in some situations and a different one in others. But sometimes, you have to make exceptions. Now, Times Higher Education is moving toward more sophisticated bibliometric measures to address these challenges in a better way.

    The second issue you mentioned—the voting behavior in reputation rankings—is completely different because it involves inappropriate behavior. And this kind of issue isn’t just institutional; sometimes, it’s at the individual academic level.

    We’re seeing this in publishing as well, where some academics are somehow producing over 200 articles a year. Impressive productivity, sure—but is it actually viable? In cases like this, the approach has to be different. It’s about identifying and penalizing misbehavior.

    At the same time, we don’t want to be judge and jury. It’s difficult because, often, we can see statistical patterns that strongly suggest something is happening, but we don’t always have a smoking gun. So our goal is always to be as fair and equitable as possible while putting safeguards in place to maintain the integrity of the rankings.

    Alex Usher: Duncan, you hinted at this earlier, but I want to turn now to the Impact Rankings. This was the big initiative you introduced at Times Higher Education. Tell us about the genesis of those rankings—where did the idea come from? Why focus on impact? And why the SDGs?

    Duncan Ross: It actually didn’t start out as a sustainability-focused project. The idea came from my colleague, Phil Baty, who had always been concerned that the World University Rankings didn’t include enough measurement around technology transfer.

    So, we set out to collect data from universities on that—looking at things like income from consultancy and university spin-offs. But when the data came back, it was a complete mess—totally inconsistent and fundamentally unusable. So, I had to go back to the drawing board.

    That’s when I came across SDG 9—Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure. I looked at it and thought, This is interesting. It was compelling because it provided an external framework.

    One of the challenges with ranking models is that people always question them—Is this really a good model for excellence? But with an external framework like the SDGs, if someone challenges it, I can just point to the United Nations and say, Take it up with them.

    At that point, I had done some data science work and was familiar with the tank problem, so I jokingly assumed there were probably 13 to 18 SDGs out there. (That’s a data science joke—those don’t land well 99% of the time.) But as it turned out, there were more SDGs, and exploring them was a real light bulb moment.

    The SDGs provided a powerful framework for understanding the most positive role universities can play in the world today. We all know—well, at least those of us outside the U.S. know—that we’re facing a climate catastrophe. Higher education has a crucial role to play in addressing it.

    So, the question became: How can we support that? How can we measure it? How can we encourage better behavior in this incredibly important sector?

    Alex Usher: The Impact Rankings are very different in that roughly half of the indicators—about 240 to 250 across all 17 SDGs—aren’t naturally quantifiable. Instead, they’re based on stories.

    For example, an institution might submit, This is how we combat organized crime or This is how we ensure our food sourcing is organic. These responses are scored based on institutional submissions.

    Now, I don’t know exactly how Times Higher Education evaluates them, but there has to be a system in place. How do you ensure that these institutional answers—maybe 120 to 130 per institution at most—are scored fairly and consistently when you’re dealing with hundreds of institutions?

    Duncan Ross: Well, I can tell you that this year, over 2,500 institutions submitted approved data—so it’s grown significantly. One thing to clarify, though, is that these aren’t written-up reports like the UK’s Teaching Excellence Framework, where universities can submit an essay justifying why they didn’t score as well as expected—what I like to call the dog ate my student statistics paper excuse. Instead, we ask for evidence of the work institutions have done. That evidence can take different forms—sometimes policies, sometimes procedures, sometimes concrete examples of their initiatives. The scoring process itself is relatively straightforward. First, we give some credit if an institution says they’re doing something. Then, we assess the evidence they provide to determine whether it actually supports their claim. But the third and most important part is that institutions receive extra credit if the evidence is publicly available. If you publish your policies or reports, you open yourself up to scrutiny, which adds accountability.

    A great example is SDG 5—Gender Equality—specifically around gender pay equity. If an institution claims to have a policy on gender pay equity, we check: Do you publish it? If so, and you’re not actually living up to it, I’d hope—and expect—that women within the institution will challenge you on it. That’s part of the balancing mechanism in this process.

    Now, how do we evaluate all this? Until this year, we relied on a team of assessors. We brought in people, trained them, supported them with our regular staff, and implemented a layer of checks—such as cross-referencing responses against previous years. Ultimately, human assessors were making the decisions.

    This year, as you might expect, we’re introducing AI to assist with the process. AI helps us filter out straightforward cases, leaving the more complex ones for human assessors. It also ensures that we don’t run into assessor fatigue. When someone has reviewed 15 different answers to the same question from various universities, the process can get a bit tedious—AI helps mitigate that.

    Alex Usher: Yeah, it’s like that experiment with Israeli judges, right? You don’t want to be the last case before lunch—you get a much harsher sentence if the judge is making decisions on an empty stomach. I imagine you must have similar issues to deal with in rankings.

    I’ve been really impressed by how enthusiastically institutions have embraced the Impact Rankings. Canadian universities, in particular, have really taken to them. I think we had four of the top ten last year and three of the top ten this year, which is rare for us. But the uptake hasn’t been as strong—at least not yet—in China or the United States, which are arguably the two biggest national players in research-based university rankings. Maybe that’s changing this year, but why do you think the reception has been so different in different parts of the world? And what does that say about how different regions view the purpose of universities?

    Duncan Ross: I think there’s definitely a case that different countries and regions have different approaches to the SDGs. In China, as you might expect, interest in the rankings depends on how well they align with current Communist Party priorities. You could argue that something similar happens in the U.S. The incoming administration has made it fairly clear that SDG 10 (Reduced Inequalities) and SDG 5 (Gender Equality) are not going to be top priorities—probably not SDG 1 (No Poverty), either. So in some cases, a country’s level of engagement reflects its political landscape.

    But sometimes, it also reflects the economic structure of the higher education system itself. In the U.S., where universities rely heavily on high tuition fees, rankings are all about attracting students. And the dominant ranking in that market is U.S. News & World Report—the 600-pound gorilla. If I were in their position, I’d focus on that, too, because it’s the ranking that brings in applications.

    In other parts of the world, though, rankings serve a different purpose. This ties back to our earlier discussion about different priorities in different regions. Take Indonesia, for example. There are over 4,000 universities in the country. If you’re an institution like ITS (Institut Teknologi Sepuluh Nopember), how do you stand out? How do you show that you’re different from other universities?

    For them, the Impact Rankings provided an opportunity to showcase the important work they’re doing—work that might not have been recognized in traditional rankings. And that’s something I’m particularly proud of with the Impact Rankings. Unlike the World University Rankings or the Teaching Rankings, it’s not just the usual suspects at the top.

    One of my favorite examples is Western Sydney University. It’s a fantastic institution. If you’re ever in Sydney, take the train out there. Stay on the train—it’s a long way from the city center—but go visit them. Look at the incredible work they’re doing, not just in sustainability but also in their engagement with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities. They’re making a real impact, and I’m so pleased that we’ve been able to raise the profile of institutions like Western Sydney—universities that might not otherwise get the recognition they truly deserve.

    Alex Usher: But you’re still left with the problem that many institutions that do really well in research rankings have, in effect, boycotted the Impact Rankings—simply because they’re not guaranteed to come first.

    A lot of them seem to take the attitude of, Why would I participate in a ranking if I don’t know I’ll be at the top?

    I know you initially faced that issue with LERU (the League of European Research Universities), and I guess the U.S. is still a challenge, with lower participation numbers.

    Do you think Times Higher Education will eventually crack that? It’s a tough nut to crack. I mean, even the OECD ran into the same resistance—it was the same people saying, Rankings are terrible, and we don’t want better ones.

    What’s your take on that?

    Duncan Ross: Well, I’ve got a brief anecdote about this whole rankings boycott approach. There’s one university—I’m not going to name them—that made a very public statement about withdrawing from the Times Higher Education World University Rankings. And just to be clear, that’s something you can do, because participation is voluntary—not all rankings are. So, they made this big announcement about pulling out. Then, about a month later, we got an email from their graduate studies department asking, Can we get a copy of your rankings? We use them to evaluate applicants for interviews. So, there’s definitely some odd thinking at play here. But when it comes to the Impact Rankings, I’m pretty relaxed about it. Sure, it would be nice to have Oxford or Harvard participate—but MIT does, and they’re a reasonably good school, I hear. Spiderman applied there, so it’s got to be decent. The way I see it, the so-called top universities already have plenty of rankings they can focus on. If we say there are 300 top universities in the world, what about the other 36,000 institutions?

    Alex Usher: I just want to end on a slightly different note. While doing some background research for this interview, I came across your involvement in DataKind—a data charity that, if I understand correctly, you founded. I’ve never heard of a data charity before, and I find the idea fascinating—intriguing enough that I’m even thinking about starting one here. Tell us about DataKind—what does it do?

    Duncan Ross: Thank you! So, DataKind was actually founded in the U.S. by Jake Porway. I first came across it at one of the early big data conferences—O’Reilly’s Strata Conference in New York. Jake was talking about how data could be used for good, and at the time, I had been involved in leadership roles at several UK charities. It was a light bulb moment. I went up to Jake and said, Let me start a UK equivalent! At first, he was noncommittal—he said, Yeah, sure… someday. But I just kept nagging him until eventually, he gave in and said yes. Together with an amazing group of people in the UK—Fran Bennett, Caitlin Thaney, and Stuart Townsend—we set up DataKind UK.

    The concept is simple: we often talk about how businesses—whether in telecom, retail, or finance—use data to operate more effectively. The same is true in the nonprofit sector. The difference is that banks can afford to hire data scientists—charities often can’t. So, DataKind was created to connect data scientists with nonprofit organizations, allowing them to volunteer their skills.

    Of course, for this to work, a charity needs a few things:

    1. Leadership willing to embrace data-driven decision-making.
    2. A well-defined problem that can be analyzed.
    3. Access to data—because without data, we can’t do much.

    Over the years, DataKind—both in the U.S. and worldwide—has done incredible work. We’ve helped nonprofits understand what their data is telling them, improve their use of resources, and ultimately, do more for the communities they serve. I stepped down from DataKind UK in 2020 because I believe that the true test of something successful is whether it can continue to thrive without you. And I’m happy to say it’s still going strong. I kind of hope the Impact Rankings continue to thrive at Times Higher Education now that I’ve moved on as well.

    Alex Usher: Yeah. Well, thank you for joining us today, Duncan.

    Duncan Ross: It’s been a pleasure.

    And it just remains for me to thank our excellent producers, Sam Pufek and Tiffany MacLennan. And you, our viewers, listeners, and readers for joining us today. If you have any questions or comments about today’s episode, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with us at [email protected]. Worried about missing an episode of the World of Higher Education? There’s a solution for that. Go to our YouTube page and subscribe. Next week, our guest will be Jim Dickinson. He’s an associate editor at Wonkhe in the UK, and he’s also maybe the world expert on comparative student politics. And he joins us to talk about the events in Serbia where the student movement is challenging the populist government of the day. Bye for now.

    *This podcast transcript was generated using an AI transcription service with limited editing. Please forgive any errors made through this service.

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  • The Great Brain Race, 15 years later with Ben Wildavsky

    The Great Brain Race, 15 years later with Ben Wildavsky

    Sometimes books can be time machines. A few months ago, I started re-reading Ben Wildavsky’s excellent ‘The Great Brain Race: How Global Universities are Reshaping the World‘. First published by Princeton University Press in 2010. And it took me literally to another planet. An optimistic one where higher education and globalization went hand in hand to enrich the lives of students everywhere and which powered universities to new heights of competition and discovery. When the book came out, I remember reading all of this and being somewhat skeptical. But with all of the nonsense of the past decade or so in global higher education, frankly, it all sounds pretty good to me right now.

    Ben is, of course, a prolific author, and he’s written a great deal on the topic of higher education, most recently, ‘The Career Arts: Making the Most of Colleges, Credentials, and Connections‘. I could have asked Ben to come on to speak about pretty much any of them, but boy, did I want to talk about The Great Brain Race because it’s such a nostalgia sugar high.

    And so, on what is roughly the 15th anniversary of its publication, Ben agreed to come on and enlighten us about what seemed new and fresh back in 2010, things like global rankings and lavishly funded branch campuses, and let me ask him annoying questions, about whether and how it’s all gone wrong. And I’m very happy that he did.

    And so enough for me, let’s throw things over to Ben.

    The World of Higher Education Podcast
    Episode 3.19 | The Great Brain Race, 15 years later with Ben Wildavsky

    Transcript

    Alex Usher (AU): Ben, 15 years ago, you wrote The Great Brain Race. What was the thesis? What trends were you trying to illustrate?

    Ben Wildavsky (BW):  I was trying to take the much-discussed phenomenon of globalization—which, of course, we heard a lot about, including in bestsellers like The World is Flat by Tom Friedman—and apply that to higher education. I felt there was already so much evidence, both emerging and well-established, that globalization had made a significant impact on higher ed.

    I wanted the book to be both descriptive and, to some extent, prescriptive. I set out to highlight what I saw as a remarkable but somewhat under-discussed phenomenon: the massive mobility of students around the world. And beyond that, the mobility of faculty as well.

    Actually, David Lodge just passed away last week—he wrote a wonderful trilogy of academic novels that had an impact on me because he was such a sharp observer. But basically, I was looking at the mobility of students, faculty, and research. And to some extent, even the mobility of campuses themselves, with the rise of branch campuses and the increasing influence of global university rankings, which acted as a way to keep score.

    So, at its core, the book’s thesis was that much like I believe in markets and free trade as beneficial for the world economically, I also made the case for what I called free trade in minds—arguing that the global exchange of knowledge and talent has overwhelmingly positive effects. That idea sometimes faces backlash, often based on what I called academic mercantilism—the notion that countries should cling to their share of knowledge and fear if others start producing more PhDs.

    But I argued that knowledge is not a zero-sum game. In fact, we should welcome the expansion of education worldwide. If more people gain access to better education, it benefits the world as a whole.

    AU: You start the book by talking about the global war for talent. I have to say, I haven’t heard that term in a few years. We’re now in a world of tariffs and growing concerns about immigration. You actually interviewed me about this about a year ago. So, are we still in a global war for talent or not?

    BW: You know, I think there are two ways to answer that. I don’t know that we hear the rhetoric about the war for talent as much anymore, but if you talk to people in the global corporate world, they are still acutely aware of their need for well-trained workers. On the consumer side—on the student side—there’s still a strong demand for building human capital. And the evidence that education is critical for economic advancement seems as strong as ever.

    So, whether or not we still use the phrase war for talent, I don’t know. But look at what’s happening right now—we’re recording this on the verge of the second Trump administration. There’s a huge internal battle among Republicans over H-1B visas, which are issued to highly skilled university graduates. The assumption is that these graduates have talent since they’ve studied at American universities, and many foreign students want to stay and work in the U.S.

    This tension has existed in the Republican Party for a long time. Not to get sidetracked, but when I started working in Washington in 1995 for National Journal, the first article I wrote was about Republican infighting over free trade. Back then, people like Pat Buchanan represented the more economic nationalist wing of the party. That strain has become much more dominant in the Trump era. However, you still have figures like Elon Musk and others in Silicon Valley—people who see the clear benefits of allowing talented foreign graduates to stay in the U.S. and contribute to the innovation economy.

    So, again, whether or not we still use the term war for talent, I think there’s a strong awareness of the connection between education, experience, and economic growth.

    AU: So, to the extent that there is—or was—a war for talent 15 years ago, one of the ways people thought a country like the U.S. could win was by building what they called world-class universities. Our mutual friend, Jamil Salmi, even wrote a book with that title, right? And quite famously, I guess, just before your book came out. But the record of actually achieving world-class status is pretty small, isn’t it? Obviously, you have Harvard, Stanford, and Yale—places that were built 150 years ago and reached that status at least 50 years ago. Who has actually become a world-class university since then? A few in China, maybe the National University of Singapore, maybe Paris-Saclay through the merger process. Why do you think we haven’t seen more of this? Is achieving world-class status simply too difficult?

    BW: That’s a great question. To some extent, it depends on expectations—should we have seen an equal distribution of world-class universities around the globe by now, proportional to population or economic development? I don’t think so. I see it more as an aspirational goal.

    Many places—China, Germany with its Excellence Initiative, and others—clearly recognized the need to build high-quality research universities modeled on the U.S. system. And of course, as you know, and as you’ve discussed with other guests—and as I mention in my book—that U.S. model itself was originally based on the German Humboldtian Research University of the 19th century. So, there’s been this back-and-forth influence over time.

    But I think the more important question isn’t necessarily how many institutions have achieved world-class status. Sure, you can point to the National University of Singapore, some Chinese universities, and Paris-Saclay. But what really stands out—something Jamil Salmi wrote about so well—is why certain institutions have succeeded.

    Take the National University of Singapore. It embraced the merit principle, while the University of Malaya took a more insular approach—implementing admission quotas for certain ethnic groups instead of competing globally for top talent. NUS made a conscious decision to compete on a level playing field of excellence.

    So, I’m not trying to dodge the question, but I think in academia, not every institution is aiming for world-class status. Many universities focus on serving the masses, which is valuable in its own right. But at the top level, whether or not you break into the top 10 or top 20, if research excellence is your North Star, then that, to me, is a triumph of the aspirational principle of being world-class.

    AU: One way people tried to keep score in the world-class university race was through rankings. You dedicate a whole chapter to global rankings in your book. At the time, I remember thinking that this seemed newer to Americans than to everyone else. The U.S. started rankings back in the 1980s with U.S. News & World Report, but those rankings focused on very different factors. Now, we have more and more rankings—it feels like a new one comes out every couple of months. But do these rankings actually matter? Have they become more consequential over time, or not? Because I don’t get the sense that they’re driving policy the way they used to. And in your country, in the U.S., I don’t see much awareness of how far down the rankings the second- and third-tier American universities have fallen. The top-tier schools are still at the top, but the U.S. used to have 40% of the top 500 universities—now it’s maybe 20–25%. A lot of those second-tier institutions have dropped off, yet there’s been no reaction in the U.S. Why do you think global rankings have had less impact than expected?

    BW: Honestly, Alex, I can’t say I follow this as closely as I once did. But looking at the U.S. side of things, we’ve always been—famously or infamously—insular when it comes to higher education.

    We tend to focus more on how states compare to one another or on issues like student access to top institutions, especially economic access, which I think is a valid concern. But we don’t really worry about how our universities stack up internationally in the rankings. That’s partly a reflection of noblesse oblige—we’ve been such a dominant global force in higher education for so long that there hasn’t been a real sense of urgency.

    Despite the backlash against globalization and growing protectionist trends, the U.S. still remains the top destination for international students. And unlike many countries that have just one or two standout universities, we have what people in sports would call a deep bench—not just a few great universities, but dozens of truly world-class institutions.

    So, when I mention noblesse oblige, I’m half-joking, but the reality is that there’s never been much concern about losing that top-tier status. At the highest levels, sure, people care about reputation, but the U.S. doesn’t have a centralized Ministry of Education or a national funding mechanism that directly ties money to rankings, the way some other countries do.

    Our mutual friend Ellen Hazelkorn has written a lot about how rankings can create problematic policy incentives, but that’s just never been a major factor in the U.S. In other countries, I’m not sure how much weight rankings still carry, but I think there’s probably still a sporting interest in the latest Times Higher Education or QS rankings—seeing where universities land each year.

    That said, the idea that universities can directly link funding decisions to ranking outcomes—and that improving a ranking will necessarily lead to positive consequences—seems to be something people are increasingly skeptical about. From what I can tell, there’s a lot more agnosticism about rankings than there used to be.

    AU: Back in 2010, one of the things you were really interested in was the still-new rise of branch campuses. I think you spent time in Education City in Doha and spoke with John Sexton of NYU in Abu Dhabi. At the time, you saw these as representing a new stage of globalization—I think that’s the phrase you used in the book. How do you think these branch campuses have turned out? And what do you make of Texas A&M recently cutting and running from Education City?

    BW: Well, before getting into Texas A&M, I’d rather start with the broader picture. I certainly don’t want to be defensive about it—things change over time. But I don’t think I ever presented branch campuses as the next stage of globalization or the ideal model for every university. I saw them as part of a period of experimentation, and I think I made that pretty clear.

    These campuses were an effort to see what worked in different contexts—and, frankly, financial factors played a huge role. NYU wouldn’t be in Abu Dhabi without significant funding from the Emirates. The same goes for Georgetown, Texas A&M (when it was there), and the other universities in Qatar. A lot of money was poured into these initiatives.

    There was never really an argument that these campuses emerged purely from market forces. The free market alone wasn’t driving these incentives. But some of these institutions—especially the better-known ones—had strong global reputations. There was demand for their degrees from the same students who were eager to study in the U.S. because of the prestige of American research universities.

    For some students—particularly women in the Emirates—studying closer to home was especially appealing. Cultural norms made it more difficult for them to travel abroad, and even today, there are restrictions. So having branch campuses nearby offered opportunities that wouldn’t have otherwise been available.

    You still see NYU operating in both Abu Dhabi and Shanghai, even though John Sexton is now emeritus. Education City has lost Texas A&M, but as far as I know, none of the other American universities have left.

    AU: No, none of the other American ones have left.

    BW: That’s right. But to some extent, each case is unique. Qatar is in a complex geopolitical position—it presents itself as a mediator in the Israel-Hamas conflict while also having provided significant support to Hamas over the years. While many people are suffering in both Israel and Gaza, some Hamas leaders are living in luxury in Qatar.

    Now, I don’t know the exact reasons why Texas A&M left, but the optics of maintaining a campus there are certainly problematic—especially for a state institution from Texas. You could argue Qatar wants to have it both ways: pursuing forward-thinking educational initiatives, which I applaud, while also being a problematic actor in other ways. That tension likely played a role.

    It’s actually surprising that China, despite being a highly problematic state in different ways, has managed to maintain relatively strong relationships with American universities. There aren’t as many partnerships as there once were, but many U.S. institutions still have a presence there.

    AU: Those branch campuses were at least as much an experiment in cultural power as they were in education, right? That’s what people were after—a halo effect. That was certainly what the Emir of Abu Dhabi was aiming for.

    BW: I think that’s a fair point. And I should add—there’s still ongoing tracking of branch campuses worldwide. My former colleagues at SUNY, the State University of New York, have a great site that monitors the number of branch campuses across different universities.

    Kevin Kinser and others have been involved in that work, though I don’t know the exact numbers today. But I don’t think branch campuses have shrunk dramatically—it’s just that expansion hasn’t continued at the same rapid pace as before.

    AU: I guess a similar area at the time was global for-profit universities. These were still quite new back then. The dominant player at the time was Laureate, though there have been new entrants and a lot of movement in that market since. I was struck by one sentence in your book—let me read it to you: “The multinational for-profit firm could turn out to be the vehicle best suited for providing broad-scale access to practical higher education, benefiting students who might otherwise have had far fewer opportunities.” Do you think that statement still holds in 2025?

    BW: Great question. In a funny way, what comes to mind is that across all sectors, there’s a huge interest in what’s now called experiential learning. The idea of practical postsecondary education is as relevant as ever. And that doesn’t just mean vocational training—it’s something beyond secondary education, but still career-oriented.

    In fact, this is a topic I’m working on for a new book. There’s a major push to develop education that’s both advanced and directly connected to workforce needs. And that’s happening not just in the for-profit sector, but in the public and mainstream higher education sectors as well.

    So, perhaps you could argue that what I described in my book has been discovered more broadly. Despite some backlash against certain forms of higher education in the U.S., globally, there’s still a strong push to expand educational opportunities beyond secondary school. The OECD continues to track educational attainment by country, and there’s concern in many places about falling behind.

    As for whether the for-profit sector has unique advantages, I’m not sure. But in the parts of the sector I still follow, things like pathway programs—which help international students gain exposure to Western universities, either in their home country or abroad—are still popular. For-profit providers like Kaplan, which I do some consulting work with, remain very active in that space. They’re particularly effective at recruiting students and providing them with the preparation they need. It’s a win-win: students want access to universities, and universities want to fill seats. That’s one area where for-profits continue to play a role.

    I’m less familiar with what’s happening in Latin America today, but when I was researching for my book, I was particularly struck by places like Brazil. There, the idea of free public education at elite universities sounded noble. People in the U.S. often ask, Why don’t we have free public higher education? But when you look closer, the students who attend these elite public universities often come from wealthy families who could afford expensive secondary schooling.

    So, in practice, free higher education often ended up being free for the wealthy. Meanwhile, for-profit universities, which some critics saw as problematic, were actually serving middle- and lower-middle-class students—offering practical programs in fields like nursing, IT, and business.

    Again, I haven’t kept up as closely with what’s happening now, but I’d say that the demand for career-focused education has been increasingly absorbed by the mainstream higher ed sector as well.

    AU: A part of what’s happened is that the vocationalization of higher education has shifted more to the master’s level—or at least the post-baccalaureate level. That’s where a lot of these private, global universities are focusing now. It’s that master’s degree space—a practical degree, like you said. It’s post-bachelor’s, so there’s something both global and vocational about it, but it might not align with the way we typically think about access.

    Listen, when I reread your book, I had a smile on my face the whole time because I thought, Oh my God, this is such an optimistic book! You don’t really see optimistic books about globalization or higher education anymore. I’m not sure anyone has written one that optimistic since you did—maybe you were the last one. So let me ask: Do you think you were overly optimistic? Or did something specific happen that derailed the future you envisioned? Is it as simple as saying, Xi Jinping, Donald Trump, and Vladimir Putin ruined everything? What happened?

    BW: Well, I love that shorthand as a way of describing where we are today—but I don’t actually think it gives a full picture of what’s happened. And I proudly wear the optimist badge.

    I don’t think I was excessively optimistic. Of course, I could point to plenty of caveats and shades of gray in the book—I made it clear that this was a work in progress.

    Our mutual friend, Phil Altbach—who’s really the dean of global higher ed scholars, and a wonderful guy—was actually quite direct with me about this. He was kind enough to blurb my book, but he also made it very clear that he thought I was way too optimistic. He tends to have a more jaundiced view of some of these developments.

    That said, I don’t think I was being a Pollyanna about it. I never argued that every development was wonderful. But I do see globalization in higher education as similar to free trade. If you were writing about free trade—now, I’m not comparing myself to Adam Smith or John Stuart Mill—but if you were setting out the principles of free trade, you’d focus on the long-term economic benefits.

    There are always setbacks, political arguments, and waves of protectionism—like the tariffs and nationalist policies we saw during the Trump administration, which, frankly, some Democrats also supported. But none of that changes the fundamental principle that free trade is economically beneficial.

    In the same way, I still believe that global higher education is expanding in ways that are, ultimately, beneficial. When I wrote the book, there were about 3 million students studying abroad for a year or more. By 2019, that number had doubled to around 6 million. The OECD had projected 8 million by 2025. I don’t know exactly where we are now, but we’re certainly in the ballpark.

    So just in sheer numbers, this expansion is happening. People are getting more educated. Claudia Goldin, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, described the 20th century as the human capital century, and I think that trend is continuing—both in places like the U.S. and Canada and on a global scale.

    Yes, you can point to a million different setbacks. There have been waves of backlash against international students in the U.K., Canada, Australia, and sometimes in the U.S. Governments implement bad policies that create temporary setbacks. But if you look at the big picture, the historical trajectory suggests that people will keep seeking opportunities to get ahead.

    What I argued in the book is that people want to get ahead based on what they know and what they can learn—not based on where they’re from or how much money they have.

    Of course, in the first waves of internationalization, wealthier students had the most access to global education. But in the long run, I believe in a more meritocratic world—one where more and more people can improve their circumstances through education, with fewer barriers standing in their way.

    That’s not just idealism—I think it’s a reality that’s unfolding, incrementally, for more and more people.

    AU: The arc of higher education is long, but it bends toward globalization?

    BW: I would say so, yes.

    AU: How do we make it bend faster? If we come back here in 15 years, what do you think will have changed to speed things up? Or will anything? What’s your sense of how things will evolve over the next few years?

    BW: To some extent, it depends on things like global economic growth. If the global economy continues—maybe with some fits and starts—but generally moves forward, and if the world becomes wealthier, then I think people will continue to recognize that human capital is king. Education and economic development are deeply connected, and as long as that remains true, people will keep seeking out educational opportunities.

    In their own countries, I hope we’ll continue to see expanded access to education, higher completion rates, and greater equity across race and class. Obviously, in the U.S., we’ve had big fights over affirmative action, but regardless of what happens on that front, people will still want more education and opportunity. And I think the same will be true globally.

    So, the real question is: What can we do to stay out of the way? How do we prevent unnecessary restrictions on international students? How do we ensure there’s a sustainable funding model? On that point, I’m somewhat agnostic—there are relatively low-cost, mass-access universities that provide real opportunities, and there are incredibly expensive elite universities. I think we probably need both.

    AU: Ben Wildavsky, thanks so much for joining us.

    BW: Thanks so much for having me. It was a great conversation.AU: And that just leaves me to thank our excellent producers, Tiffany MacLennan and Sam Pufek, and you—the reader, viewer, or listener—for joining us. If you have any questions or comments about today’s episode, don’t hesitate to get in touch at [email protected]. And don’t forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel—sign up and never miss an episode of The World of Higher Education. Join us next week when our guest will be Duncan Ross, former Chief Data Officer at Times Higher Education. He’ll be talking with us about the world of global university rankings. Bye for now.

    *This podcast transcript was generated using an AI transcription service with limited editing. Please forgive any errors made through this service.

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  • Small College America Podcast Returns for a New Season – Edu Alliance Journal

    Small College America Podcast Returns for a New Season – Edu Alliance Journal

    Dean Hoke and Kent Barnds Relaunch Acclaimed Series to Explore the Future of Small Colleges

    Bloomington, Indiana – February 3, 2025 – Small College America, the podcast dedicated to exploring the strengths, challenges, and future of small colleges, is officially relaunching with a new season. The series is co-hosted by Dean Hoke, Managing Partner of Edu Alliance Group and former President/CEO of the American Association of University Administrators, and Kent Barnds, Executive Vice President for Strategy and Innovation at Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois.

    Both Hoke and Barnds are passionate advocates for small colleges, having graduated from Urbana University (OH) and Gettysburg College (PA), respectively. Their personal experiences and professional expertise have shaped their commitment to highlighting the vital role these institutions play in American higher education.

    “The landscape for small colleges is shifting rapidly, and we believe now is the time to amplify the conversation about their future,” said Kent Barnds. ” Dean and I are both passionate advocates for these institutions because we’ve experienced firsthand the impact of a small college education.”  Dean Hoke stated, “The first season of Small College America confirmed that there is a deep need for dialogue about the opportunities and challenges facing these schools. With this new season, we aim to engage with higher education leaders to explore innovative strategies that will help small colleges not just survive but thrive in an evolving higher education environment.”

    The original four-part series first aired on January 10, 2023, and was hosted by Dean Hoke and Tom Davisson, who now serves as Charter Commissioner for the National Association for Academic Excellence (NAAE). The inaugural season featured insightful conversations with small college presidents, including:

    • Dr. Barry Ryan, Former President of Woodbury University (Burbank, California)
    • Stefanie Niles, President of Cottey College (Nevada, Missouri)
    • Ryan Smith, President of the University of Rio Grande and Rio Grande Community College (Rio Grande, Ohio)
    • Janelle Vanasse, President of Alaska Pacific University (Anchorage, Alaska)

    The new season of Small College America will continue its mission of bringing critical discussions to the forefront by interviewing higher education leaders, policy experts, and innovators. The podcast will delve into the evolving role of small colleges, their economic impact, innovative strategies for sustainability, and how they can continue to provide a highly personalized educational experience.

    Season Two will begin weekly on March 11th at 11AM Eastern. More details, including upcoming, will be announced soon.

    For updates, visit [Podcast Website] or follow Small College America on [Social Media Links].

    About the Hosts

    Kent Barnds is the Executive Vice President for Strategy and Innovation at Augustana College, where he has been a senior administrator since 2005. A recognized thought leader in enrollment management and institutional strategy, Barnds is deeply invested in the success of small colleges and the students they serve.

    Dean Hoke is Managing Partner of Edu Alliance Group, a higher education consultancy, and formerly served as President/CEO of the American Association of University Administrators (AAUA). With decades of experience in higher education leadership, consulting, and institutional strategy, he brings a wealth of knowledge on small colleges’ challenges and opportunities.

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  • Colombia’s Higher Ed Utopia or Illusion? Insights with Javier Botero

    Colombia’s Higher Ed Utopia or Illusion? Insights with Javier Botero

    Latin America sometimes flies below the radar in discussions of global higher education. It’s too poor to have major players in the world-class universities game, but it’s too rich to be among the attention-getting new highfliers like Vietnam. And even within Latin America, not every country gets the same attention. Colombia also kind of flows below the radar, lacking the size of Mexico or Brazil, not punching above its weight like Chile, and not being stark raving tonto like Venezuela. But Colombia actually is pretty special because of the size and shape of its system. It’s actually in the middle of a range of debates going on across the world, making it a kind of miniature of the globe as a whole. A move to gratuidad, like in Chile? Colombia is doing that. Constant pressures on quality assurance, given its 207 public and private institutions? Check. Creating new popular universities on the Mexican model? Yep, that’s happening too. Working out how to improve student loan repayment? Well, ICETEX, the country’s national student loan agency—actually the oldest such agency in the world—is working on that too. In short, this is a country whose thinking on higher education deserves a lot more attention than it usually gets.

    The current government of Colombia, led by left-wing President Gustavo Petro, came to office with big ideas about higher education. But without a majority in Congress, things are not going his way. It’s not clear that he can pay for the gratuidad he promised young voters three years ago during his election campaign.

    With me today is Javier Botero, a lead consultant at the World Bank and formerly the Vice Minister of Higher Education in Colombia. He’s here to walk us through the latest developments in that country around free tuition, student assistance, and an intriguing case of institutional closure at the University of Antioquia.

    This was a fun, fast interview, and I enjoyed it a lot. I hope you do too. So, without further ado, let’s hand things over to Javier.

    The World of Higher Education Podcast
    Episode 3.18 | Colombia’s Higher Ed Utopia or Illusion? Insights with Javier Botero

    Transcript

    Alex Usher (AU): Javier, the last time you were on, we discussed President Petro’s ambitious plans for the higher education sector. One of his goals was to increase enrollment by half a million students. Two years later, have we seen much progress on that promise?

    Javier Botero (JB): Well, really, not as much as one would have expected. Of course, at the very beginning—and I’m sure I said this in that interview—I thought it was far too ambitious, you know, something in the clouds. But I think they’ve achieved about 20–25% of that.

    Mostly, this growth has been in technical education through SENA, this huge public institution that offers free technical education. Very little has happened in private education, where enrollments have actually decreased. Some state universities have increased their enrollments, but much less than what the government expected.

    AU: So it’s as much a shift in enrollments as it is an addition to enrollments.

    JB: That’s right. I mean, it is an addition in some sense because it’s true that some students who would have had difficulty accessing higher education have been able to do so—mainly through technical education or state universities. So there has been an increase in access for students from lower economic sectors of society.

    AU: That’s good. So, late last year—or maybe it was the year before—the president signed a law guaranteeing free tuition at Colombian public universities. Now, we have to be careful about that word because, for instance, in Chile, you have gratuidad, but it only applies to certain students, under specific conditions, like an income cutoff. So, what does the Colombian promise about free tuition consist of? Does it really mean free tuition for everyone?

    JB: Yeah, of course not. But the first thing I’d say is that this isn’t actually a policy of this government—it started under the previous government. What Petro did was clarify some points and widen the scope of the policy. Still—and I’m glad about this—it’s not for everyone. It’s targeted at certain groups, based on income. We have something called estratos, and it’s for the three lowest estratos. There are also other groups included, like Indigenous people, some Afro-descendants, and others who have faced significant disadvantages for years. So, yes, it has restrictions, but this is something Colombia has been working on for about six years now.

    AU: So, it is targeted free tuition, but not just based on income. As you said, there are some ethnic categories involved as well. That’s interesting.

    JB: And not just ethnicity. You all know Colombia has been through a peace process. People involved in or victimized by the violence during that period also qualify for free tuition in public institutions—and there are quite a lot of them.

    AU: All the groups involved in the peace negotiations, or their children, would benefit from this?

    JB: Yeah, and not just them. People who declared themselves victims during the period of violence in Colombia also qualify.

    AU: How much does this commitment cost? I’ve noticed there’ve been stories in the Colombian press about the government losing a tax reform vote just before Christmas, which must make it harder to afford these programs. So what’s the government’s financial ability to keep this promise?

    JB: You know, that’s one of the main issues—and a big question—because no one really knows how much it costs. In Colombia, universities have a lot of autonomy. Each university sets its own tuition, even public ones. So there’s a huge variety in tuition rates.

    Some public universities were almost free for poor students, while others charged tuition based on income, and some had relatively high tuition rates. This diversity makes it very difficult to calculate the cost.

    Chile faced a similar challenge when implementing gratuidad, but I’d say it’s even worse here because of the variation. For example, universities that used to charge very little would continue to receive little funding, while those that charged a lot would get much more. To resolve this, they came up with an average subsidy amount based on factors like the type of university, research output, and number of professors.

    AU: I’s a per-student subsidy based on the institution, not tuition?

    JB: That’s right. That’s the free tuition program.

    AU: I remember in Chile, when they were setting up their policy of gratuidad, they asked a question that made no sense in English: “Where do we set tuition so that tuition can be free?” It was funny, but it made sense in context.

    JB: Exactly, because that determines how much money the university gets from the government per student.

    AU: So I understand that while the government is trying to lower tuition costs, it’s also reducing expenditures on the student loan program, ICETEX. That feels like robbing Peter to pay Paul. What’s the logic behind this—free tuition but lower student aid?

    JB: First of all, free tuition in Colombia is not like in Chile—it’s only for public institutions. Private institutions don’t qualify for free tuition, so they don’t receive any subsidies for it. ICETEX, which is our student loan agency with over 50 years of experience, is mainly used for students attending private universities.

    Your point is valid, though. The logic is mostly ideological—the idea that education should be public and free. The private sector is seen as unnecessary, so the government focuses on public institutions and doesn’t assist students attending private ones.

    But this hasn’t helped at all with the goal of increasing enrollment by 500,000 students. ICETEX’s budget has already been cut, and the situation for 2025 looks critical. Not only because of these ideological choices, but also because of the budget deficit. We’re starting the year already in deficit, and I’m sure ICETEX will face more cuts.

    AU: Javier, I remember that quite early on in his tenure that President Petro seemed to be quite taken by the Mexican model of the Benito Juarez universities in remote locations. Maybe there may be some Venezuelan model he has in mind as well because they’ve opened a lot of new universities too. Has there been much movement on this front in the last two years?

    JB: A little bit, I would say, but also let me add that that’s not a either a new policy either. You know, we did this 20 years ago when I was working with the government with what we called the regional centers of higher education. The idea was to bring higher education to rural and small towns in Colombia because what you see is that for those who can—students from those towns that can go to a university, to higher education—they have to go to the big cities, and most of them stay there. So, it’s actually a brain drain from the small cities to the big cities, and that’s an issue. You really want more equity and homogeneous development in a country.

    So, many countries—Venezuela, at the time we did this, that was 2002 or 2003—were also starting what they called aldeas universitarias, like small-town universities, with the same idea. Mexico did that and has now a big program. But there are still many issues with that. One of them is the academic part—students from these regions have relatively low academic levels, so you have to work a lot to get them to a level where they can actually start a university program.

    The second issue, as with most things, is funding. How do you fund this? Of course, it’s very hard to expect that students will pay tuition to private universities in those regions, and those issues have not yet been resolved.

    AU: Recently—I think it was in September or October—the University of Antioquia in Medellín was the center of some very significant protests, some of which turned a little bit violent. What sparked those demonstrations? Was it something about specific issues at that institution, or was it about wider issues within higher education in Colombia?

    JB: I would say both. It’s wider issues—issues that are common to most universities—but at the University of Antioquia, these issues have brought the institution to a more difficult situation. And it’s really the funding, the financing of the universities. The University of Antioquia was one of those that actually charged very little tuition. Most students paid just a couple of dollars to study a semester, and they increased enrollment numbers significantly. They joined the policy, 10 to 15 years ago, of opening different regional campuses in small towns at very high cost. But they haven’t gotten the money to cover all of that, so they’ve been in a very difficult financial situation.

    Students started asking, “What will happen with this university?” There were delays in paying teachers, especially the type of teachers we have here in Colombia who are not regular faculty but teach specific classes and get paid for those hours. The university delayed those payments, and students and unions joined the protests—particularly the union of those types of teachers. This eventually led to the university closing. The university is now closed, and we are discussing how they will end last year’s final semester. It seems they won’t be able to.

    AU: So, did they close because of the protests, or did they close because they couldn’t make payroll?

    JB: Both. The teachers joined the demonstrations and the strike, so it wasn’t possible to keep the university open. They tried to keep some programs running virtually, using what they had learned from the pandemic, but it’s been very difficult.

    AU: To regain some stability—both there and in the rest of the country—you need a stable government. But the president has never had a majority in Congress. He’s losing key votes on taxes, recently lost a finance minister to a graft scandal, and he’s only about 18 months away from the end of his term. Is there any prospect he regains the initiative and can forge a renewed policy in this area, or is this going to be a really long lame-duck period?

    JB: I think the latter is most probable. It’s been less than three years, and we’ve had three ministers already. It looks like there will be another change in the ministry, so there’s no continuity in policies. The political situation is not getting better—it’s getting worse. As the elections approach next year, it will get even worse. The opposition will polarize further. And President Petro is not the type to try to calm things down; instead, he often throws gasoline on the fire.

    Maybe two years ago, they tried to pass a statutory law on education, but they couldn’t. Now, the minister is talking about passing a law just to change the funding model, which I must say is very archaic. It doesn’t incentivize universities to do much. With free tuition, it pushes them a little to admit more students, but that’s not a good solution because, as we see in Antioquia, it only worsens the problem. I don’t think much will happen in the remaining 20 or 22 months of this administration.

    AU: We’re already seeing the 2026 presidential elections start to take shape. Are any of the leading candidates likely to pursue policies in higher education that are radically different from the current government? You mentioned that, to a large extent, what President Petro is doing is a continuation of the previous government. So, do we expect continuity or change as we head towards those elections?

    JB: I would say there will be very different positions among the candidates. What you said isn’t totally true—Petro kept the free tuition policy, but there are many other aspects behind that. I expect some candidates, like Alejandro Gaviria—who was Petro’s first minister, though only for a few months—will bring higher education to the forefront. Gaviria is already a pre-candidate, and higher education is very popular as an issue because students vote, unlike primary and secondary students.

    Higher education in Colombia needs a deep reform, going far beyond just funding. Funding is an important issue, but the system requires much deeper changes. I expect some candidates will propose strong policies, but we’ll have to wait and see what happens with those proposals and who gets elected. The political situation in Colombia, like in many parts of the world, is very polarized, and in polarized environments, the best choices don’t always get into office.

    AU: Javier Botero, thank you so much for joining us today.

    JB: It was my pleasure. Thank you very much.

    AU: And it just remains for me to thank our excellent producers, Tiffany MacLennan and Sam Pufek, and you—our viewers, listeners, and readers—for joining in. If you have any questions or comments about today’s episode, please don’t hesitate to get in touch at [email protected]. Don’t forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel so you never miss an episode of The World of Higher Education. Join us in one week’s time when our guest will be freelance writer Ben Wildavsky. He and I are going to chat about the 15th anniversary of his influential book, The Great Brain Race. Bye for now.

    *This podcast transcript was generated using an AI transcription service with limited editing. Please forgive any errors made through this service.

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  • The Governance of European Higher Education: Convergence or Divergence? with Michael Shattock

    The Governance of European Higher Education: Convergence or Divergence? with Michael Shattock

    Higher education is famously isomorphic. Around the world, knowledge is divided into disciplines in almost identical ways. Around the world, students go through a largely similar bachelor’s, master’s, doctorate sequence. And around the world, higher education institutions are heavily stratified, mainly according to their research outputs. Higher education institutions aren’t exactly homogenous. But the systems they live in, what they do, what they cover, et cetera, are substantially similar, except for one thing. Governance.

    Governance can mean a few things in higher education. At the system level, it’s about the relationship between institutions, both individually and collectively, and government. At the institutional level, it’s about the nature of public oversight, if any. These two different varieties of governance vary enormously from one country to another, and I would argue, are at the root of the glorious level of disharmony, individuality, and sheer quirkiness we see across national systems today, despite all the drivers towards isomorphism.

    The person who’s possibly written the most about this topic anywhere, ever, is Michael Shattock. He’s the former Registrar of Warwick University, a visiting professor at the University College of London’s Institute of Education, and an Honorary Research Professor in the Department of Education at Oxford University. He’s the author or co-author of a number of books about university governance around the world, and he joined us for this episode to talk about one of his more recent books, published by Bloomsbury, called The Governance of European Higher Education, Convergence or Divergence, co-authored with Aniko Horvath and Juergen Enders.

    Europe has some very old and deep-seated differences in the ways universities are governed. The French, German, and English systems, to take only three, have completely different ideas about what the relationship between the university and the state should be, not to mention some very contrasting notions about the role of the professoriate in institutional management. What practical impact do these differences have? Well, that’s what Michael and I sat down to chat about a few weeks ago. I hope you enjoy the conversation.

    The World of Higher Education Podcast
    Episode 3.17 | The Governance of European Higher Education: Convergence or Divergence? with Michael Shattock

    Transcript

    Alex Usher (AU): Michael, in your book, you talk about three grand traditions of European governance: the British or Anglosphere model, the French Napoleonic model, and the German Humboldtian model. How do those three styles or forms of governance vary when it comes to the relationship between universities and the state?

    Michael Shattock (MS): Well, I wouldn’t call them grand traditions. I think what they are now is more a set of underlying components of higher education policies.

    The Humboldtian tradition, which started in 1810, had an enormous influence across Europe because it brought research and teaching together into a single model. Around the same time, Napoleon established a single university for all of France, but it focused exclusively on teaching. This approach eventually led to the creation of the Grandes Écoles, which were also focused primarily on training.

    In the Anglosphere, universities were founded by local communities and had no initial relationship with the state. In the UK, for example, universities enjoyed considerable autonomy, which only began to change when they started seeking public funding. This relationship was formalized in 1919 and changed again after World War II in 1946, when the government decided to fully fund universities, which were struggling to recover financially.

    AU: One area where these traditions and these approaches to university-state relations have had a significant impact is in how countries have expanded their higher education systems since World War II. For example, some countries have introduced new universities or specialized institutions like the Fachhochschulen in Germany or the Institut Universitaire de Technologie in France. Does one system handle massification better than the others?

    MS: I think Germany has done particularly well in handling massification. Their success stems in part from the German constitution, which emphasizes homogeneity across the Länder. Another factor is that higher education in Germany is devolved to the Länder, so each of the 16 or 17 Länder has its own higher education system.

    These systems are interconnected and governed through collaboration between the Länder, the Conference of German Rectors, and, to some extent, the federal government through bodies like the Wissenschaftsrat. This framework ensures coordination without creating the competition you might see in more marketized systems.

    However, the German system isn’t without its issues. Following the Humboldtian model, Germany requires all universities to be both research- and teaching-oriented. The Fachhochschulen, which were established after the war, are not allowed to conduct research. As a result, three-quarters of students attend universities, while only one-quarter attend Fachhochschulen.

    Even so, the system is relatively equitable across the country and maintains strong principles of integrating research and teaching.

    AU: Governance isn’t just about university-state relations—it’s also about how institutions govern themselves. How do these three traditions differ in that regard?

    MS: Well, if we start with the Napoleonic tradition—which extends beyond France to Italy, Spain, and Portugal—you’ll see that universities are still under strong state control. In theory, the state is meant to act as a steering body, but in practice, these systems are highly regulated.

    The first issue when it comes to expansion in these systems is whether the state is willing to support growth and allocate resources accordingly. By contrast, in the UK, there’s a tacit belief that anyone with the appropriate qualifications should be able to access higher education. Theoretically, funding follows the students, but in reality, over the past five years, we’ve seen the students come while the funding often doesn’t follow.

    Secondly, there’s been a long-running debate—originating with the Lisbon declaration—about whether continental European universities should aim to match American universities. A series of reports, including excellent research by Professor Aguillon, highlighted a key difference: American universities often have lay-run governing bodies, whereas many European universities do not.

    This principle of having a governing body separate from purely academic leadership has been widely debated across Europe, with each country arriving at different solutions. In Hungary, for instance, the governing body consists of only five members, all from the ruling political party—a move that has faced objections in Brussels. Meanwhile, in Norway, the governing body includes two to five laypeople alongside academics, and they’ve even abolished the Senate, feeling it’s no longer necessary.

    So, there have been significant changes in the governance structures of universities, particularly in how these top-level committees are organized.

    AU:  Michael, you state in your book that European systems have faced three major challenges this century: the Lisbon declaration’s push to make Europe the most innovative society, the Bologna Process, and the rise of international rankings. How have European systems responded to these drivers? Have their responses been uniform, or have they diverged?

    MS: If you recall, my book has a secondary title, Convergence or Divergence. After the Lisbon Declaration, the expectation was that there would be significant convergence across European higher education systems. However, higher education wasn’t part of the Treaty of Rome, meaning the EU has no formal jurisdiction in this area.

    One might have assumed that the Bologna Process, with its establishment of the “3-2-3” model—three years for undergraduate degrees, two years for master’s degrees, and three years for PhDs—would lead to greater alignment in how universities are run. But that hasn’t been the case. In fact, the book strongly argues that divergence has overshadowed convergence, driven by national preconceptions and the varying resources available in different countries.

    Take Portugal, for example. In the book, we use it as a case study for universities in Southern Europe. Historically, Portugal’s universities were concentrated in coastal cities like Lisbon, Porto, and Coimbra, with no significant presence in rural areas. One of the country’s key higher education initiatives has been to establish institutions in the countryside. While not entirely successful, this effort has been an important part of their overall strategy to expand access.

    So, while divergence has often dominated, it’s worth noting that differing starting points can sometimes lead to similar endpoints. In some cases, divergent reactions to challenges may still result in convergence on a single model over time.

    AU: Divergence often happens because systems start from different points. For example, the relationship between research and teaching has been diverging in some systems, especially through institutional stratification. Are we seeing convergence in academic culture around this?

    MS: I wouldn’t describe it as a convergence, but if you think back to Lisbon, there was a strong emphasis on increasing the commitment to research within university systems. This focus has led to significant changes in how higher education systems are structured.

    For example, in the UK, research and teaching are managed by two entirely separate government departments. The Department of Education oversees teaching, while the Department of Industry and Innovation handles research. As a result, universities receive funding from two distinct sources.

    In Portugal, we encountered an unusual situation where the government felt it needed to invest more in research. To address this, they proposed—or perhaps it was the universities’ idea—to move research activities off the main university campuses and into smaller, independent research centers. These centers would allow polytechnic researchers to collaborate with those from established research universities. However, this approach has created unintended consequences. These research campuses have become increasingly autonomous, to the point where university rectors often have little understanding of what’s happening at these off-campus sites. Rather than strengthening the polytechnics, this model has effectively turned university campuses into teaching-only institutions, which I see as a step backward.

    The EU has also become more involved in this area, despite not having a formal role in higher education. Through the Horizon program, the EU has made substantial funding available for academics across member states to compete for. Interestingly, the UK has just negotiated its way back into Horizon following Brexit. This shift suggests that the EU, which had previously focused on undergraduate teaching through initiatives like the Bologna Process, is now channeling its higher education investments almost entirely into research via Horizon.

    As a result, universities across Europe are being pulled in different directions, and the ways these tensions manifest vary significantly from country to country.

    AU: One part of your book I enjoyed was your discussion of student participation in governance. In continental Europe, students often have significant roles in decision-making. How do these roles differ across countries?

    MS: I think the cultures around student participation differ significantly between countries. Let me start with Germany. The German higher education system went through a difficult period of intense student activism in the 1980s and 1990s. What has emerged from that is a system where students now play a significant role in university governance, particularly through their involvement in the Senate.

    This involvement is quite remarkable. For instance, when a candidate for a professorship is presented to the Senate for approval, student members have the same rights as academic members to challenge or endorse the appointment. Students are deeply integrated into the university’s internal negotiations, and rectors often leverage student opinions to balance or counteract the influence of academic groups. In this way, students have become a central element of university governance.

    In Norway and Portugal, the role of students is slightly different. National student organizations in these countries hold substantial influence within government decision-making. Additionally, they take on responsibilities that, in systems like those in Britain or Canada, would typically fall to the universities themselves. These include providing student accommodation, offering career advice, and managing other social services.

    While students in these systems may engage with certain academic issues, their role in the direct governance or operational management of the university is far less pronounced than what we see in Germany.

    AU: This isn’t your first book on university governance. With this new book on Europe, do you see European systems heading in the same direction as the rest of the world, or are they charting a different course?

    MS: The global trend is toward greater state involvement and oversight in higher education. Even in countries like Japan, there has been an attempt to shift from a traditional government-management relationship with universities to what is described as a “steering” relationship. However, in reality, governments still maintain a significant grip on university systems.

    Looking across Europe, you can observe different approaches to state control. Take Hungary, for example. In Hungary, the state has effectively taken over the management of the higher education system. Chancellors, often drawn from other public service sectors, are imposed by the state to sit on university governing bodies alongside rectors, with significant control over finances.

    In contrast, countries like Norway and Germany have a much lighter touch when it comes to state intervention. In these systems, there is a belief—particularly in Germany—that university autonomy is crucial for institutional success. This stands in stark contrast to Britain, where there is a rhetoric supporting university autonomy, but in practice, universities are heavily influenced by external pressures like league tables and global rankings.

    Another interesting shift in recent years has been the growing recognition of universities as “anchors” in their communities. This concept emphasizes the important role universities play, particularly in smaller towns, in contributing to local social and economic well-being. This idea of universities having a broader community impact is relatively new compared to 25 years ago, but it reflects an evolving understanding of the societal role of higher education.

    AU: Let’s look forward 25 years. If you were to write this book again in 2050, would you expect more convergence or divergence?

    MS: Well, I have to admit, I was afraid you would ask me this question, and I’ve given it some thought. To put it simply, I believe that in Europe, divergence will persist. The nation-state, as it currently operates in Europe, will continue to resist attempts by the EU to modernize and harmonize higher education systems. This resistance makes it difficult to achieve the kind of convergence the EU envisions.

    AU: Michael, thank you so much for joining us today.

    MS: Pleasure.

    AU: And thank you to our producers, Tiffany McLennan and Sam Pufek, and to you, our listeners and viewers. If you have any questions about today’s episode or suggestions for future ones, email us at [email protected]. Don’t forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel. Join us next week when our guest will be Javier Botero, discussing developments in Colombian higher education. Bye for now.

    *This podcast transcript was generated using an AI transcription service with limited editing. Please forgive any errors made through this service.

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  • Beyond the Rhetoric: Mexico’s Higher Education Reality with Alma Maldonado Maldonado

    Beyond the Rhetoric: Mexico’s Higher Education Reality with Alma Maldonado Maldonado

    Hi everyone. I’m Alex Usher, and this is the World of Higher Education podcast. If you’re a really faithful listener, you may remember that when the show was in beta and we were fooling around with formats and guests, we did an episode about Mexican higher education and its tribulations under the populist president Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador or AMLO for short.

    Our guest that day was my friend, Alma Maldonado Maldonado, an education researcher at Cinvestav, which is the Center for Research and Advanced Studies of the National Polytechnic Institute. That interview was so brilliant, we turned this podcast into a full-time investigation of higher education developments in various countries around the world.

    Today, Alma’s back with us again to talk about how things have and have not changed in Mexico over the past two years. The big story there is that there’s a new president in town. Last spring, Claudia Sheinbaum became the country’s first ever woman president. One who happens to have a PhD in engineering with a specialty in energy and sustainability.

    You’d think that might be an advantage to a higher education sector, but Scheinbaum comes from AMLO’s Morena party and her instincts seem to be to continue her predecessor’s tradition of attacking higher education as being a dissolute elite enterprise.

    So what does this mean for Mexican higher education? Well, in general, it’s not good. Alma takes us through the implications of Morena’s supermajority in Congress, as well as its early attempts to put fiscal pressure on universities, and its continued fascination with the experimental and kind of shambolic Benito Juarez universities.
    Spoiler alert, there are not a lot of silver linings in this story, either for public or private sector universities in Mexico. But enough from me, let’s hand things over to Alma to explain.

    The World of Higher Education Podcast
    Episode 3.16 | Beyond the Rhetoric: Mexico’s Higher Education Reality with Alma Maldonado Maldonado

    Transcript

    Alex Usher (AU): Alma, almost two years ago, then-President López Obrador had about a year and a half left in his mandate and was essentially at war with the university sector and the scientific community. How did his administration end with respect to higher education? Did anything change? Did things get better or worse in his final months? Were there any significant policy shifts we should know about?

    Alma Maldonado Maldonado (AMM): Hi Alex, thanks for inviting me. It’s a pleasure to be here. Well, I think most things didn’t change. Essentially, everything stayed the same. His rhetoric and narrative against higher education institutions, against graduates from abroad, and especially against UNAM, continued until the end of his term, unfortunately.

    There wasn’t anything that made him change that rhetoric. One reason for this is that he had political capital—he knew his base supported him fully. So, why change something that was working for him? On the contrary, the attacks on universities and the restriction of resources continued right until the end.

    AU: So, nothing was resolved. But earlier this year, there were elections for the presidency and both the Chambers of Deputies and the Senate. Did higher education play any role in that election? Were there significant policy differences between the parties?

    AMM: Not really. Education didn’t feature much in the campaign—similar to what we see in the U.S. It just wasn’t important. There were only a few mentions here and there about education, but in general, it wasn’t a key part of any campaigns.

    What we did see, unfortunately, was this sort of competition around scholarships. One candidate would say, “I’ll offer scholarships for secondary education,” and the other would respond, “Well, I’ll offer scholarships for secondary, but also primary, and even preschool!” That was the extent of the debate around education policy between the two main candidates. I’m not surprised but it was very disappointing because in a country like Mexico, where education can be a major driver of social change, it wasn’t given the attention it deserves.

    AU: The winner of the election was Claudia Sheinbaum of the Morena party, the same party as López Obrador. But she has a somewhat different image—she’s a scientist with an advanced degree from UNAM, a doctorate, I think. Does her presidency signal any kind of shift for higher education?

    AMM: It’s complicated. On paper, yes, she’s better. She has a PhD from UNAM and worked as an academic—one of the few cases where an academic has become president. Not the first, of course, but still, it’s notable.

    She has a pro-science and pro-higher education rhetoric, especially given her background in the student movement at UNAM in the 1980s. She fought alongside people like Emanuel Ordorica, Carlos Simas (her former husband), and Antonio Santos. She wasn’t a leader in that movement, though now some are rewriting history to present her as one.

    Her narrative emphasizes free higher education and the idea that education is a right, not a privilege. But since she took office a few months ago, we haven’t seen much change in terms of the most important issue—financing. It’s clear: follow the money.

    In the initial draft of the national budget, the funding for UNAM and other major universities was cut. Later, the government said, “Oh no, it was a mistake. We didn’t mean to cut the budget. Sorry, let’s fix it.” Imagine—someone who champions free higher education putting universities in that position. It’s a contradiction.

    AU: She has large majorities in both chambers of parliament, so she has significant power to implement her agenda. Why do you think she proposed cuts to education funding initially?

    AMM: Well, because she’s seen as the president of higher education and science. Reducing the budget as her first move would’ve been disastrous for her image.

    But you’re right—she has total control of Congress and the Senate. Right now, she’s focused on other reforms, particularly in the judicial system, and she’s changing a lot of laws. Education isn’t on the map because López Obrador already changed the Constitution’s third article, which governs education. There’s no immediate need for her to revisit it.

    AU: Let’s circle back to the budget cuts. Last month, the proposed budget included a cut of 10 billion pesos—about 500 million U.S. dollars—to higher education, with half of that falling directly on UNAM. There was significant outcry, and she backtracked somewhat. Do we know how this will end up? Will the universities be held whole, or are cuts still coming?

    AMM: They decided to reorganize the budget, but now they’re cutting other areas instead. Unfortunately, that includes initial education and other sectors. They also cut the Senate’s budget, which has caused disputes.

    In terms of higher education, they’ve claimed that funding will remain the same as last year, with a slight adjustment for inflation. But the adjustment is minimal—about 3%—while experts estimate inflation at around 5% but they’re just adding 3%. So, effectively, there’s still less money to spend. There’s less money for infrastructure, materials, and other essentials. Universities are in a slightly better position than they were a few weeks ago, but the situation remains difficult. The contradictions in her policies have drawn a lot of criticism.

    AU: Why was so much of the proposed cut targeted at UNAM? Was it deliberate? Is there animosity toward the university?

    AMM: There’s speculation about that. Some believe it was a punishment for UNAM’s independence, particularly regarding topics like judicial reform. UNAM has maintained a critical stance, which Morena and Claudia don’t like.

    Let’s not forget that one of the first things López Obrador did when he came to power six years ago was to modify the Constitution’s third article, removing university autonomy. When there was backlash, they said, “Oh, it was a mistake. We didn’t mean it.” But there have been many such “mistakes.”

    AU: Going back to AMLO, he also set a goal of increasing enrollment by 1.5 million students while also underfunding institutions at the same time. How did that play out? Did he reach that goal? How did the funding play into the final result?

    AMM: Currently, enrollment coverage in higher education is about 44%—very low compared to other Latin American countries. AMLO’s goal was to reach 50%, but he fell short.

    Now, Claudia Sheinbaum is aiming for 55%. I don’t think that’s realistic. The common system in Mexico is to add 5% on any policy, even if the last one isn’t achieved. To achieve that, they’d need to add about 1.2 million students, which isn’t feasible with the current system.

    The problem is that the educational spaces being created aren’t in the places where students want to go. There’s a clear contradiction between their enrollment goals and actual planning.

    AU: Part of AMLO’s strategy was the Benito Juárez Universities—small, access-oriented institutions in remote areas. You previously described them as “Potemkin institutions.” What’s the current situation? Will Sheinbaum continue with this policy?

    AMM: Yes, she’s continuing the project. But as I’ve said before, it remains very obscure. We don’t know who attends these universities, who teaches there, or what students are learning. I have a student doing their master’s dissertation on these universities, and they can’t get access for research.

    Sheinbaum recently announced plans to open 50 more. But we don’t even know what’s happening with the existing 140—or whether that number is accurate. There have been protests at these universities over issues like unreceived degrees and inadequate resources. I wouldn’t be surprised that Colombia would adopt them because they’re friends of Claudia. The idea is that these institutions could increase 40,000 new spaces. While they’re meant to provide education in remote areas with programs tailored to local communities, they’re not addressing the larger participation gaps.

    AU: We’ve been talking mainly about the public sector, but what about the private sector? Institutions like Tecnológico de Monterrey are highly regarded. How does the disarray in the public sector affect them? Does it make them stronger?

    AMM: I think they are struggling too, but we need to distinguish between the high-prestige institutions and the low-prestige ones. So, let’s start with the high-prestige institutions like Tecnológico de Monterrey or Universidad Autónoma de Guadalajara.

    They are struggling financially, particularly because some scholarships they used to receive for graduate programs have been eliminated. For example, many students in their graduate programs previously got scholarships from the National Science and Technology Council. But now, under the current rhetoric, those scholarships are only being given to students in public institutions.

    This has forced high-prestige private institutions to get more creative with their resources to maintain their programs.

    On the other hand, there are low-prestige private institutions, some of which are as bad as the Benito Juárez Universities. They lack quality, but the government lets them operate because they solve a demand problem. Parents want their kids to attend college, and these institutions offer that possibility, even if the education isn’t great. Families make sacrifices to pay for these degrees because, in their minds, a degree is still a degree.

    And then, in the middle, there are institutions that are more decent in terms of quality. But the big question is: who ensures the quality of these institutions? That’s been a longstanding issue, and it hasn’t improved under the current government.

    AU: It’s a classic trade-off we see in many countries. Alma, we’ve covered a lot of doom and gloom. Are there any bright spots you foresee for 2025?

    AMM: I wish I could say I see more positive things coming, but honestly, I don’t. A big part of my concern is tied to North America and what a Trump presidency could mean for Mexico. If he returns to power, we’re likely to face serious challenges around migration and broader U.S.-Mexico relations.

    It’s really sad that Mexico didn’t take advantage of opportunities to strengthen ties with the U.S. while Biden was in office. There could have been agreements, collaborations, and advancements, but those didn’t materialize.

    In the face of all this, creativity will be key. Maybe we’ll see new programs to support migrants with higher education degrees who end up staying in Mexico. It’s critical that we do better this time than we did during the Dreamers situation. But honestly, I’m not confident that the government is prepared to handle these challenges effectively. So, unfortunately, I don’t see much good news ahead.

    AU: Well that’s a good reminder that international affairs do intrude on higher education affairs sometimes. Alma, thanks for being with us.

    AMM: Thank you very much, Alex.

    AU: And thank you to our excellent producers, Tiffany MacLennan and Samantha Pufek. If you have comments or questions, reach out at [email protected]. Don’t forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel. Join us next week when Michael Shattock will discuss governance in European universities. Bye for now.

    *This podcast transcript was generated using an AI transcription service with limited editing. Please forgive any errors made through this service.

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  • Where Canada lies in Global Trends with Alex Usher

    Where Canada lies in Global Trends with Alex Usher

    Happy New Year and Welcome back to the World of Higher Education Podcast! I’m Tiffany MacLennan, your host for the day which means our guest is the one and only, Alex Usher.

    In this episode, we’ll explore key global trends in higher education and then dive into how Canada fits—or doesn’t—within them. From widespread funding challenges to the politicization of universities and the evolving focus on vocational education, we’ll unpack how these issues play out on a global scale and what they mean for Canadian post-secondary sector. Let’s hear from Alex.

    The World of Higher Education Podcast
    Episode 3.15 | Where Canada lies in Global Trends with Alex UsherKelchen

    Transcript

    Tiffany MacLennan (TM): Alex, many of our guests this year discussed how their higher education systems are grappling with significant funding challenges. Can you tell me what some of the issues have been globally? Have there been any places that haven’t been struggling financially?

    Alex Usher (AU): I think in the developed world, you’ve got very similar issues: slow economic growth, price volatility, an aging demographic, and frankly, increasing skepticism about how higher education translates into economic growth. What you’ve seen everywhere, I think, is a weakening in the desire to invest in higher education—certainly compared to where we were 20 years ago. Back then, when global rankings started, everyone wanted to climb higher in the rankings. That reflected a belief by countries that investments in knowledge paid dividends, that more top universities meant a better economy. I just don’t think people believe that anymore. And until that belief comes back, it’s going to be tough to get public funding. Private funding—through higher tuition fees, for example—is still possible, and it works in some places, like China. But in much of Europe, where taxes are high, people feel like they’ve already paid their dues and don’t want to pay tuition fees. In North America, Australia, and the UK, there’s growing skepticism about whether higher education is delivering value for money. The combination of those two have put higher education in a difficult position.

    So, globally, there’s a gap. Universities and academics know what kind of product they’d like to offer the public, but nobody wants to pay for it—either privately or publicly. That gap, I’d say, is about 10-15% in most countries. India and Turkey being exceptions to the rule with recent increases.

    TM: That’s interesting. Are these funding challenges playing out in the same way in Canada, or are there unique factors at play here?

    AU: When it comes to public funding, I think Canada’s pretty much following the global trend. Maybe we’ve defunded institutions a bit more than some other countries, but that’s because we thought we’d found a workaround: international students. I always say public funding of public education is a public good, but foreign funding of public education? That’s a public great. If you can get another country’s middle class to subsidize your middle class’s education, why wouldn’t you do it?

    And that’s what Canada did. We thought that marketization would save us and in marketization, in our case, was largely about internationalization. For a decade, every time governments said, “We’re not investing this year,” institutions said, “That’s fine, we’ll bring in another 10,000 international students.” And it worked—for a while, a decade really. But we weren’t the only ones. The UK, Australia, and the Netherlands became similarly dependent on international students.

    And in all those countries, decades of nimbyism and a failure to build housing eventually hit a breaking point. Housing prices soared, and international students—fairly or unfairly—got blamed for it.

    In Canada, we’ve seen the federal government move to cut international immigration, including reducing the number of international students coming in. That’s caused rental prices to drop for the first time in years. But it’s also exposed the vulnerability of this funding model. You can’t rely on international students forever if the public doesn’t want to pay for higher education.

    TM: One of our past guests, Simon Marginson, has talked extensively about the growing polarization in higher education around the world. We’ve heard about this polarization in the U.S. with the Trump administration, in Russia, and in other places. Can you summarize what this polarization means and how it’s playing out globally?

    AU: I’m not convinced that polarization is the right way to frame it. What we’re really seeing is the increased politicization of higher education, a public good.

    For a long time, the idea was that publicly funded higher education would be responsive to the public. But if the public goes bananas—if they elect fascists—then higher education reflects that. It’s not polarization per se; it’s increased state control over higher education, regardless of how much governments are actually funding it.

    In Canada and the U.S., for instance, governments don’t fund post-secondary education to a huge extent, but they’re exerting more and more influence over it. Meanwhile, in places like China and Russia, we’re seeing autocratic governments tighten their grip on higher education—not because of polarization, but because they see academia as a threat. Putin has been in Russia for 25 years, there’s not a new polarization, he’s now choosing to exert greater state control.

    For years, there was this idea that higher education would democratize these countries. “Educate more people, and they’ll demand democracy.” But it didn’t happen. Instead, higher education made autocrats more aware of the potential for political dissent and using higher education to affect political change, and they’ve responded by cracking down on it.

    I think this trend is almost universal. Governments are less democratic overall because of short time frames. You see it in Canada, where provincial governments increasingly order universities to do things. And next week, Alma Maldonado is going to talk about how a left-wing populist government in Mexico is doing similar things. It’s not a left-right issue—it’s about state control.

    TM: Do you think Canada is more insulated from this politicization, or are we seeing divides within our own higher education system? It’s January 6th right now, Justin Trudeau stepped down about 4 hours ago and we’re going to go into an election. How does this affect the next handful of years in Canadian higher education?

    AU: We’re not insulated from it, but the pressures here are less extreme. For example, the Ontario government made a big deal about free speech on campus six years ago, but all it has amounted to is a two-page report every year from the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario and nothing else happened. It’s performative but the conservatives are happy because they showed those liberal jerks where to get off, and that’s fine. The right is satisfied with a certain level of performativity.

    You’re seeing it right now in Alberta, there’s been some noise about shutting down equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) programs. Calgary and Alberta have rebranded EDI portfolios as “access, community, and inclusion,” but they’re not doing anything fundamentally different, even though they have different letters of the alphabet. Boards and universities know it’s worth being inclusive, and they’re not going to stop doing that.

    So you have to give conservative governments symbolic victories over universities, but they still want their kids to go there. That’s different from the U.S., where we’re seeing a real shift in how Republican families view higher education and how many children, male and female, want to attend university. Here, I think we’ll see culture war issues pop up, but I don’t think they’ll reach U.S. levels.

    TM: Another hot topic on the podcast this year has been the vocationalization of higher education—this push for more work-ready graduates. Is this part of a global trend?

    AU: I’m not actually sure this is a new trend. Since at least the 1960s, as we’ve moved from elite systems of higher education to mass and then universal systems, vocationalization has been part of that shift. Once higher education is no longer a luxury good, it becomes more about what people can get out of it.

    Massification has always been accompanied by vocationalization because most people want to know that what they’re studying will help them get ahead. That’s not new.

    You do hear rhetorical volleys about this, like “We need more plumbers and fewer philosophy grads.” I think Rick Scott might’ve been the one to say that. But you don’t actually see governments translating that rhetoric into significant program changes. What really drives programming shifts is student demand—what applicants choose to study. Which is very different from governments coming in and making these changes. For example, are students less interested in the humanities? Sure. But we still have higher humanities enrollments today than for 99% of human history. They’re not as high as they were in the 1980s or 1990s, but they’re still significant.

    In countries that are newer to mass or universal higher education—like in parts of Africa, Asia, and Latin America—you’re seeing more demand for vocational programs. That’s because it’s not just the upper class going to university anymore. Middle-class and lower-middle-class families want to make sure their investment in education leads to tangible returns, they don’t want to do it just because it’s a nice time.

    So, is vocationalization a global trend? Yes, but it’s been happening for decades. It’s not a new phenomenon.

    TM: In Canada, do you think recent changes to immigration and student work visa policies will shift the balance between vocational and liberal arts education?

    AU: Let me start with vocational education in Canada, because I think it’s one of the best things we do. Over the last 60 years, we’ve built a remarkable system—completely unplanned, of course. Canadians don’t really plan higher education; we stumble into things. But we ended up with a system that offers a lot of options for people who don’t want to go to university or pursue more theoretical studies.

    We’ve created pathways into the middle class through vocational education, which I think is the secret to Canadian egalitarianism. The community college system—whether it’s polytechnics, local community colleges, or CÉGEPs in Quebec—provides young people with opportunities that don’t exist in many countries. And they’re good options that lead to good jobs.

    The problem is, like universities, no one wants to pay for it. Governments don’t seem to understand that not training enough people is part of what’s causing bottlenecks in areas like building things and meeting labour needs. It’s wild—especially in Ontario, where the Ford government has no sense of how this all ties together.

    On the international student front, Canada’s college system has been attractive because it offers a pathway to permanent residency. That’s brought in a lot of international students, and some colleges have benefited immensely—especially those that took full advantage of this, and pigged out. They’ve become incredibly rich, and much of that money has gone into building infrastructure. But now, with changes to immigration and postgraduate work visa policies, we’re going to lose a lot of those students. It’s already starting to hurt.

    In Ontario, for example, international students were cross-subsidizing some of the most expensive programs, particularly in the trades. Without them, it’s going to be tough to keep some of those programs running. We’re going to see closures and cuts.

    Universities, on the other hand, won’t be as affected. Most international students at universities are in business, science, and engineering programs, which are less impacted by the policy changes. But for colleges, especially those that relied heavily on international students, the next few years are going to be very difficult. It’s carnage in the colleges and it’s bad for universities.

    TM: Last question. Which of the recent trends do you think will stick, and what do they mean for the future of Canadian higher education?

    AU: I think most of the trends we’re seeing now will stick around for a few years. I don’t foresee governments suddenly having a revelation and deciding, “We should fund post-secondary education more.” It just doesn’t seem likely. You might see some marginal changes, but they won’t be transformative.

    Take Alberta as an example. Over the next decade, they’re expecting a 30 to 40 percent increase in the youth population. You’d think that would lead to investments in higher education capacity—this is as predictable as it gets with demographics—but it’s not happening. It’s not that they can’t see it; they simply don’t want to spend the money.

    One way Canada stands out, though, is how limited our thinking has become when it comes to skills. The PIAAC data came out recently, but it barely made a ripple. Twenty years ago, governments would have looked at that data and asked, “What skills do our young people need to succeed in the world?” Now, when you mention skills, they only think about trades and healthcare. The broader idea of transversal skills—those that matter for the entire economy, not just specific occupations—has disappeared from the conversation.

    Our policy community in higher education seems to have been lobotomized over the past couple of decades. We’ve stopped focusing on the big issues. That said, when governments are lazy or inattentive, institutions sometimes have the space to innovate. I think we’ll see some exciting developments around teaching, AI, and microcredentials. Maybe not as much as some expect, but more than I would’ve thought a few years ago.

    I also expect shorter university programs to emerge—likely returning to three-year degrees, as we had in the 1980s and 1990s. With labour shortages becoming more acute, institutions won’t be able to keep students for four years anymore. This will take time—probably a decade or so—but I think it’s coming.

    In general, universities are going to need to focus more on labour market outcomes, skills, and efficiency. Students will likely appreciate this shift, especially if institutions start respecting their time more. But it’s going to require universities to think differently about money. For decades, the solution has been to find more revenue and throw it at problems. That’s no longer viable. Now, they’ll have to look at the cost side and find smarter, more efficient ways to operate.

    It’s going to lead to a very different kind of university system—one that’s more focused on cost-effectiveness, shorter programs, and labour market alignment. These changes could last five, maybe even ten years, but they’re coming, and they’re going to reshape the sector.

    TM: Alex, thanks for joining us this week. Join us next week, when Alex is back as host, and Alma Maldonado joins us again to give an update on the Mexican higher education system. See you then!

    *This podcast transcript was generated using an AI transcription service with limited editing. Please forgive any errors made through this service.

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  • Top 10 U.S. Higher Ed Stories of 2024 with Robert Kelchen

    Top 10 U.S. Higher Ed Stories of 2024 with Robert Kelchen

    Robert Kelchen is a prolific higher education researcher and also the head of the University of Tennessee at Knoxville’s Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies. He is also a pretty steady blogger on higher education, but he doesn’t have the time to post quite as much as he did before he took on all those extra admin duties. One of the casualties of his reduced blogging schedule is that he no longer posts his regular “top ten” stories of the year in US higher education, which I, as an outsider, always used to find a handy way to keep track of what mattered over the long term in the US.

    But last year, Robert agreed to reprise his role of summarizer-in chief for us on the year’s final pod, and reaction was so positive, we thought we would have him on again for our final podcast of 2024. As always, Robert is sharp, succinct, and not one to shy away from unconventional calls. And so, without further ado, let’s hear Robert’s Top Ten.

    The World of Higher Education Podcast
    Episode 3.14 | Top 10 U.S. Higher Ed Stories of 2024 with Robert Kelchen

    Transcript

    Alex Usher (AU): Robert, let’s start things off. What’s your number 10 story this year?

    Robert Kelchen (RK): Number 10 out of the U.S. is more changes to big-time college athletics. It seems like things cannot stay stable, and that’s in part because there is so much money involved. So, the big changes this year are more teams changing athletic conferences. Everyone is trying to jockey for position in big-time college athletics to be on the right side of TV contracts. Never mind that the next round of TV contracts may look very different with people cutting the cord from cable. The other big piece is a landmark settlement with former athletes. That requires a financial settlement and then also athletes going forward are going to get about 20 percent or so of all revenue.

    AU: Gross revenue?

    RK: Yeah. So, this also affects the number of scholarships that programs can offer. Previously for big-time athletics, that number was limited. Now, it’s not limited. They focus more on roster sizes instead. This means colleges have some really tough financial choices to make. Because they have to pay athletes, and if they want programs to be competitive, they need to offer more scholarships. That means what will probably happen is some colleges are going to look at dropping sports to club status so they don’t have to pay for scholarships. While also keeping in mind they can’t just drop the women’s sports, at least under Title IX regulations. Although, who knows what’s going to happen for regulations.

    AU: We’ll get to that. We’ll get to that. Let’s move along to number nine.

    RK: Number nine is college closures. It always seems to hang on the list because we continue to see closures. We had a really chaotic closure in early June with the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. I don’t think they were on anyone’s radar for closing.

    Their public financials at the time looked decent, but then their accreditor stepped in, saying, “We’re going to shut you down,” and it happened within a week.

    It was apparently for financial reasons. And it wasn’t immediately obvious from the financial statements from, say, a year and a half ago, what was going on. But it seems like they just ran out of cash very quickly. And it got to the point where, with a week’s notice, students couldn’t finish, faculty couldn’t find jobs, and staff couldn’t find jobs. It was just the absolute worst way to do things.

    AU: Has the number of closures actually ticked up—I mean, you’ve made the point on many occasions that there are always program closures.

    RK: Yeah, you know, there are always program closures. They really did try to push a lot of the low-performing for-profits out, and there just aren’t as many now.

    But I think the big piece that’s coming now is not college closures as much as program closures and academic restructuring. It’s a great time to be a consultant in this industry. Because consultants are the ones brought in to help do the studies on this, identify programs that may need to be closed, and institutional leaders like it because someone else is making the tough calls.

    AU: What about number eight?

    RK: Does anyone want international student? They’ve been a cash cow for many institutions for a while now but that’s beginning to change. Australia’s gotten the majority of the global news coverage on this, with their efforts to try to cap enrollment, which is really divisive there, especially among the more rural institutions that would like more international students. You’re seeing it in Canada, the UK, and the US looking to move in that direction. That potentially creates opportunities in Southeast Asia or in Europe.

    Another wildcard in international students is what’s going to happen with both China and India? Where China is always at risk of having a major policy change, and there seems to be a fair amount of instability in India right now.

    AU: Number seven?

    RK: Number seven is state funding for higher education. There’s been a lot made in the U.S. about disinvestment in public higher education, but over the last decade or so, state funding for higher education in most states has been pretty strong. The states where it’s been the weakest are often the more politically liberal states, and that’s basically because they’ve had more longstanding budget issues. But a number of the more conservative states have funded pretty well, and state funding is at a two-decade high right now.

    I have a hard time seeing that continuing because state budgets have largely flatlined for the upcoming fiscal year. There have been some states that have gone down the route of tax cuts from post-pandemic money that’s starting to come due. But also, there’s just more skepticism about the value of public higher education. And there are states like Utah where enrollment is up substantially. But they’re looking at cutting funding and telling universities and colleges to expect less in the way of enrollment. This really creates the haves and have-nots in public higher education. The big-name public universities are growing like crazy. The regionally focused colleges are struggling mightily.

    AU: You’ve talked about a flight to quality among students. Is it likely that state funding starts to follow into the flagships more than it used to?

    RK: It depends in part on the funding model. If it’s an enrollment or performance funding type model, then that will happen. But also, states don’t want to see regional institutions fail. So they need to have some kind of capacity there.

    The big question that states have to wrestle with is how big they want their flagship institution to be. Do they want to push students to regional institutions? In some states, they have the governance structure in place to do that, even though it’s extremely politically painful. And in other states, there’s no centralization whatsoever, so there’s really nothing they can do about it.

    AU: What about number six?

    RK: Number six is the protests about the war in Gaza and the fall of several Ivy League presidents. I did some analysis back in the spring, and it was really only at a fairly small number of colleges, these protests. But they happened at the institutions that policymakers care about — the super-elite private colleges and some of the big public flagships. Congressional Republicans found that hauling in college presidents — especially women of color — plays really well to their base. And I think that was one of the reasons behind republican elector success.

    AU: That appearance in front of Congress by the presidents of Penn, MIT, and Harvard really was kind of the flashpoint of the year, wasn’t it? I mean, two of them were out within a month of that appearance. It’s another example of Americans assuming that what happens at a very small handful of prominent private institutions is actually reflective of something bigger, isn’t it?

    RK: That’s exactly it. And one of the big reasons is that so many of the policymakers and so many of the journalists — that is their sphere, that’s what they know. We’re also seeing a really interesting dichotomy as President-elect Trump announces his key political appointments. He’s abolishing the Department of Education, reforming higher education, but at the same time, all his press releases highlight the colleges these people went to. So, he’s saying, “They went to NYU, they went to Penn,” while simultaneously dumping on them.

    AU: Robert, what about number five?

    RK: Number five is the increased political realignment by educational attainment. It used to be that if people had a bachelor’s degree, there was a pretty good chance they were pro-business Republicans. That was a substantial part of the base — part of what really kept the party going post-Reagan through the George W. Bush years.

    Then, I think we saw a bit of this starting with Obama, and then it really moved forward. The Democrats made substantial gains among college-educated individuals, especially those with postgraduate degrees. Then Trump came in 2016 and really accelerated the realignment, where college-educated individuals shifted to the Democratic Party, while non-college-educated individuals moved toward the Republican Party.

    That is a sea change to where pollsters now are focusing on weighting polls based on education instead of race or gender. There are still divides in those areas, of course. But what this means for higher ed is that higher education has long been relatively apolitical in the U.S. — probably had a 50-year run that way. But that has started to change dramatically, and that change threatens higher education enrollment as well as public support for the sector.

    AU: It’s tough for a public university. I mean, it’s like saying hospitals are Democrats, right? Or K-12 schools are Republican. It’s weird for a public institution to be identified as partisan. It can’t be easy for public university presidents to be in that position. What can they do? What are they doing to try to reverse that trend?

    RK: One piece of it is who becomes a president of a university or system. We’re seeing more politicians take on those roles. Some of them are unsuccessful, but some of them are very successful as they try to be the bridge between academics and the legislature.

    The other big piece is focusing on outreach and the public mission. Public higher education has two main advantages: one is community outreach, which includes things like agricultural extension classes and community programming. The other is athletics like football, it’s a big driver of public support.

    AU: Okay, what about number four?

    RK: Number four is accreditation. It’s a topic that’s deep in the weeds for a lot of people, but it’s in the political spotlight right now.

    Two big examples stand out. One is the toughest accreditation job in the U.S., which is at the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS). We no longer have truly regional accreditation in the U.S. — that went away under the first Trump administration. But SACS is still largely focused on conservative southern states, and those states are not happy with accreditation. In Florida, for instance, they decided you have to switch accreditors every cycle. SACS President Belle Whelan is retiring, and I have no idea who in the world would want that job. That is probably the most difficult job in American higher education.

    AU: What’s the potential impact of accreditation becoming more politicized?

    RK: Some of it is just administrative burden for higher ed. If institutions are expected to switch accreditors or if accreditation standards change constantly, that’s a lot of administrative cost.

    But the bigger issue is, will accreditors uphold basic standards? They’ve largely punted on academic standards because every time they try, they get sued. They often win those cases, but it’s expensive. So, accreditors have largely focused on finance. But, the perception is that they’re focused too much on diversity, equity, and inclusion. SACS is actually the only major accreditor that does not require that.

    Another big pressure on accreditation is that several accreditors are now trying to push for shorter bachelor’s degrees. The U.S. traditionally has 120-credit bachelor’s degrees, but there’s a push for 90-credit degrees — shorter, faster, cheaper, better. There’s a strong rationale for it, but also concerns about educational quality. This could completely upend the higher ed finance system. If you get less revenue per student and you eliminate some of the upper-level courses, that might work. But it seems like they’re taking away more of the lower-level general education courses, and those courses subsidize other parts of the system.

    AU: Interesting. Okay, I think DEI has something to do with number three as well.

    RK: Yes. State governments are pushing higher education hard on more of these social issues. Texas and Florida have taken the lead on trying to ban any mention of diversity, equity, and inclusion. In a lot of conservative states — including mine — DEI is now known as “access and engagement” or “access and belonging” or something else. They don’t want to use those words because people expect emails and course syllabi to be searched for those terms.

    At the University of North Texas, for example, the new leader, who came from the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, required that all mentions of DEI be eliminated. They focused on the education school, which is also searching for a new dean.

    AU: But it’s gone beyond just excising words or renaming units. If I recall correctly, at North Texas, they were even getting rid of words like “racism” from course syllabi, which makes it hard to teach U.S. history, doesn’t it?

    RK: It does. There was a round of this about a half dozen years ago where the response was to get rid of the words and do the same thing, the legislatures did not like that so now they’re trying to go back and root all of these out.

    AU: Alright, let’s move on. What’s number two? We’ve got to be coming pretty soon to the election, right?

    RK: We are. But I actually don’t think the election is number one this year. The election of Trump is a big deal, and it will have large effects on American higher education. Will the U.S. Department of Education go away? I’m still extremely skeptical of that. Every Republican since 1979 has said they want to abolish it, but it’s difficult to get rid of an agency. And also, Republicans may have unified control in Washington, D.C., but it’s by the skin of their teeth. They can afford to lose, I think, only two votes in the House of Representatives, and it’s a fractured caucus. They’ve got a lot of other priorities, too.

    Plus, you have members looking ahead to 2026 and wondering if they can get re-elected when the majority party typically loses seats in a midterm election. So, it’s going to be a very unsettled, interesting time. But I don’t see the Department of Education going away.

    The bigger question is, what can sneak its way onto that one bill each year that can be passed completely on a partisan basis? The U.S. has a mechanism called reconciliation, where anything with a budgetary impact can go through the Senate with just 50 votes instead of 60. So, that’s where the action will be.

    If they wanted to make changes to student loans, for example, that would have a direct budgetary impact, so it could be part of a reconciliation bill. The challenge is then uniting the Republican caucus. They’re not always well-aligned. And they’ll have to figure out their priorities. Is it immigration? Is it tax cuts, since the Trump tax cuts are set to expire at the end of 2025?

    And even within education, how big is their focus going to be on K-12 education versus higher education? If history is any guide, K-12 will get most of the attention.

    AU: We also have a new Secretary of Education. She seems quite different from Betsy DeVos. What do you expect from her?

    RK: Yeah, she’s definitely different. Her name’s Jovita Carranza. She ran the Small Business Administration, and by all accounts, she got fairly good marks from employees over there. She’s actually one of the few high-level Trump appointees who did not go to an elite institution. She got a teaching certificate and a French degree from East Carolina University. I just found that fascinating. But I think it’s part of the strategy — put the person with a teaching credential in charge of the Department of Education. From a management perspective, she seems competent. From a policy perspective, it’s a little less clear.

    The stated goal is still to get rid of the Department of Education. But even if that’s their goal, actually pulling it off is another story. There’s legislation to basically break apart the department and shuffle its components into other federal agencies. But that’s a long, complicated process. I’d probably say the chances of it happening are maybe 5 to 10 percent at best.

    AU: Yeah, that sounds about right. Okay, bring us to number one.

    RK: Number one doesn’t come from the White House this year — it comes from the U.S. Supreme Court. And it’s a big one. The Supreme Court decision in Loper Bright overturned a 40-year-old precedent called Chevron. The Chevron doctrine gave federal agencies broad discretion to interpret laws where the statute was vague, and courts would generally defer to the agency’s interpretation. It was seen as a major source of power for the so-called “administrative state.”

    But conservatives have wanted to get rid of Chevron for years. They saw it as giving too much power to unelected bureaucrats. Well, they finally got what they wanted. The Supreme Court’s ruling says, “No more deference to agencies. If the statute isn’t clear, it’s Congress’s job to fix it.”

    AU: So why is that such a big deal for higher ed?

    RK: It’s a big deal because so much of higher education policy in the U.S. happens through administrative rulemaking. Look, the Higher Education Act hasn’t been reauthorized since 2008. Congress hasn’t done anything. So everything that’s happened since then — like changes to student loans, Title IX rules, and accreditation requirements — has been done through executive action or rulemaking by the Department of Education.

    With Loper Bright, that power is now significantly reduced. Agencies can no longer just “interpret” laws as they see fit. They need clear statutory authority from Congress.

    So, here’s the twist. Loper Bright was something conservatives pushed for because they didn’t like how Democratic administrations used Chevron to expand regulations on, say, environmental protection or labor standards. But now, with a Republican administration on the way, they’ve tied their own hands.

    If Trump wants to make big changes to higher education — like dismantling the Department of Education, reforming student loans, or changing Title IX — he’s going to have a harder time doing it through executive action. He’s going to need Congress, and Congress isn’t exactly known for its efficiency.

    AU: So, to summarize, when Democrats were in power, Chevron was seen as a bad thing because it gave them more power. But now, with a Republican in power, they’ve realized that Chevron would’ve been useful for them, too.

    RK: That’s it. It’s ironic, right? They dismantled their own ability to govern. And I think the Trump administration learned a lot the first time about how to effectively use executive authority. They were pretty bad at it in the early years, but they figured it out by the end. Well, now their hands are tied in some crucial areas.

    AU: So, in the end, the impact of the Trump presidency might be a lot less than people think because he won’t be able to wield executive power in the same way.

    RK: That’s quite possible.

    AU: Fascinating. Well, Robert, thank you so much for being with us today. It’s been a great ride, as always. We’ll see you back here in 12 months, and we’ll see how much has changed by the end of 2025.

    RK: Probably quite a bit.

    AU: Yeah, no doubt. Thanks, Robert. And it just remains for me to thank our excellent producers, Tiffany MacLennan and Sam Pufek, and of course, you — our listeners — for tuning in. If you have any questions or comments about today’s episode, feel free to reach out to us at [email protected]. And don’t forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel so you never miss an episode of The World of Higher Education.

    We’ll be back on January 9th with our first episode of the new year. Our guest is a mystery for now — you’ll just have to wait and see. Stay well, have a good holiday season, and bye for now.

    *This podcast transcript was generated using an AI transcription service with limited editing. Please forgive any errors made through this service.

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